Reaching for Unique Resources: Structural Holes and Specialization in Scientific Collaboration Networks

Abstract

On some fundamental level, we can think of scholars as actors possessing, or controlling, various types of resources. Collaboration in science is understood here as a process of pooling and exchanging such resources. We show how diversity of resources engaged in scientific collaboration is related to the structure of collaboration networks. We demonstrate that scholars within their personal networks simultaneously (1) diversify resources in collaboration ties surrounded by structural holes and (2) specialize resources in collaboration ties embedded in dense collaboration groups. These complementary mechanisms decrease individual efforts required to maintain effective collaborations in complex social settings. To this end, we develop a concept of "pairwise redundancy" capturing structural redundancy of ego's neighbors vis-à-vis each other.

The evolution and co-evolution of a primary care cancer research network: From academic social connection to research collaboration

“…Future research should further address the evolution and co-evolution of relationships and collaboration within (cancer) research networks; in particular between less and more senior researchers as it remains unclear whether it is the bridge function that senior researchers may have towards junior researchers, the density of the CanTest network itself (densely linked networks are more efficient at diffusing information to all their members when compared to sparsely linked groups), or a combination of both that encourages researchers to move forward [25,54]. A combination of a densely linked network and the availability of one or several 'bridging researchers'-often referred to as brokers-might be ideal, pursuing a network that is maximally effective in facilitating collaboration between its members [55].…”

“…Females are more often reported to appreciate relationships and the process of collaboration, whereas actual collaborative activity is reported to be higher for males [22][23][24]. Comparably, where junior researchers are more likely to increase their number of academic social relationships to gain access to new resources for collaboration, senior researchers may be more reserved in creating new relationships because they have many collaborative relationships already [25][26][27]. Yet, studies that link academic social relationships and collaboration-to explore the effect of gender and seniority in academic social relationships and collaboration in more detail-are lacking.…”

Academic Collaboration via Resource Contributions: An Egocentric Dataset

“…The catalogue, which is a unique contribution in scientific collaboration studies, was constructed based on the extensive literature review and themes mentioned by our interviewees. The data have been used to study whether structurally non-redundant ties are more likely to be characterized with resource contributions not found in other ties (Bojanowski and Czerniawska, 2020).…”