Exploring the influence of coauthorship with top scientists on researchers’ affiliation, research topic, productivity, and impact

Xie, Qing; Zhang, Mengjie; Kim, Giyeong; Song, Min

doi:10.1016/j.joi.2022.101314

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…These relationships are frequently mutually beneficial. Less visible authors benefit from more opportunities to publish papers in high quality journals that attract larger audiences, whereas top scientists gain collaborators with unique skills to produce more high quality work [18]. Close collaboration of less visible academics with those in the upper echelons can furthermore create opportunities for a first-mover advantage, inducing a positive feedback loop and early bandwagoning of innovative ideas [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don't follow the leader: Independent thinkers create scientific innovation

Sean¹,

Baten²,

Proma³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these "superstars" foster leadership in scientific innovation? We introduce three information-theoretic measures that quantify novelty, innovation, and impact from scholarly citation networks, and compare the scholarly output of scientists who are either not connected or strongly connected to superstar scientists. We find that while connected scientists do indeed publish more, garner more citations, and produce more diverse content, this comes at a cost of lower innovation and higher redundancy of ideas. Further, once one removes papers co-authored with superstars, the academic output of these connected scientists diminishes. In contrast, authors that produce innovative content without the benefit of collaborations with scientific superstars produce papers that connect a greater diversity of concepts, publish more, and have comparable citation rates, once one controls for transferred prestige of superstars. On balance, our results indicate that academia pays a price by focusing attention and resources on superstars.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%