https://phys.org/news/2018-11-ideas-viral-academia.html

In particular, the team simulated how ideas might spread out faster from highly-ranked schools than from those at the bottom of the pile—even when the ideas weren't that good. The results suggest that academia may not function like the meritocracy that some claim, said Morgan, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science.

She and her colleagues began by drawing on a dataset, originally published in 2015, that described the hiring histories of more than 5,000 faculty members in 205 computer science programs in the U.S. and Canada.