Editor Network

The Gini coefficient measures how unequally editorial seats are distributed across individual editors. Each editor has a seat count (distinct journals they sit on), and the Gini summarises the whole population with a single number in [0, 1]:

• Gini = 0 — everyone holds the same number of seats (perfect equality).
• Gini ≈ 0.3–0.5 — moderate concentration: a long tail of single-board editors plus a small group with many.
• Gini → 1 — a tiny elite holds virtually all the seats and most editors hold one or zero.

Formally, with seat counts x₁, x₂, …, x_n sorted ascending, we compute G = 1 + 1/n − 2·(Σi Σj≤i xj) / (n·Σx) — the standard Lorenz-curve identity. The observed value (0.1809) therefore reflects how skewed the seat-holding distribution is: 731,230 distinct editors hold 919,312 seats between them, with a long tail dominated by single-board editors and a small head of prolific multi-board editors.

How to use it. Track this number across releases: if it rises, editorial seats are becoming more concentrated in fewer hands. Compare it across slices of the data (e.g. compute it within a single publisher or field) to see which sub-communities are more concentrated. A value below 0.3 is roughly "broadly shared" and a value above 0.5 is "highly unequal" by the conventions of income-inequality literature — but note that the underlying distribution here is editorial seats, not income, so direct comparison to country-level Gini values (0.25–0.60 range) is only a loose intuition pump.

Reference. Gini, C. (1912). Variabilità e mutabilità: Contributo allo studio delle distribuzioni e delle relazioni statistiche. Studi Economico-Giuridici dell'Università di Cagliari, 3, 3–159. — Original definition of the coefficient. See also the Wikipedia entry for the Lorenz-curve formulation used here, and Lorenz (1905) for the graphical construction behind it.