The academic wanderer: structure of collaboration network and relation with research performance

Abstract

Thanks to the widespread availability of large-scale datasets on scholarly outputs, science itself has come under the microscope with the aim of capturing a quantitative understanding of its workings. In this study, we leverage well-established cognitive models coming from anthropology in order to characterise the personal network of collaborations between scientists, i.e., the network considered from the standpoint of each individual researcher (referred to as ego network), in terms of the cognitive investment they devote to the different collaborations. Building upon these models, we study the interplay between the structure of academic collaborations, academic performance, and academic mobility at different career stages. We take into account both purely academic mobility (i.e., the number of affiliation changes) and geographical mobility (i.e., physical relocations to different countries). For our investigation, we rely on a dataset comprising the geo-referenced publications of a group of 81,500 authors extracted from Scopus, one of the biggest repositories of academic knowledge. Our main finding is that there is a clear correlation between the structure of co-authorship ego networks and academic performance indices: the more one publishes and the higher their impact, the larger their collaboration network. However, we observe a capacity bound effect, whereby, beyond a certain point, higher performances become increasingly less correlated with large collaboration networks. We also find that international academic migrants are better at growing their networks than researchers that only migrate within the same country, but the latter seem to be better in exploiting their collaboration to achieve higher impact. High academic mobility does not appear to translate into better academic performance or larger collaboration networks. This shows a different finding with respect to related literature, where scientific productivity is seen as directly linked to mobility. Our results show that, when looking at impact of research, this is not necessarily the case.

Research in Pesantren-based Higher Education: Exploring The Factors Improving Lecture's Research Performace

“…In fact, among the others, the collaboration network was the most influential factor in improving research performance. This finding is not surprising, regarding that numerous researchers commenced acknowledging the critical role of collaboration networks in higher education, particularly in enhancing research performance (Paraskevopoulos et al, 2021;Aldieri et al, 2020;Rahimi et al, 2020;Inayati, 2019;Sabah et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2014) and research funding (Álvarez-Bornstein & Bordons, 2021;Möller, 2019;Doh et al, 2018).…”

“…In examining the effect of collaboration networks on research performance in the higher educational context, numerous studies explored various levels, including internal collaboration (Slavova et al, 2016;Aldieri et al, 2017;Hopp et al, 2010), local/national collaboration (Sabah et al, 2019), and international collaboration (Paraskevopoulos et al, 2021;Inayati, 2019;Sabah et al, 2019). In this study, the entire collaboration network above, which consisted of internal, local, and international collaborations, were examined to acquire a more comprehensive understanding.…”

“…The collaboration network scale was developed from the study conducted by Paraskevopoulos et al, (2021), Slavova et al, (2016) and Kim et al, (2014), covering internal, local/national, and international collaboration. University research funding is adapted from Doh et al, (2018).…”

“…In addition, several other studies attempted to investigate the resource factor in particular. Some of them included collaboration (Paraskevopoulos et al, 2021;Aldieri et al, 2020;Rahimi et al, 2020;Inayati, 2019;Sabah et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2014) and research funding (Álvarez-Bornstein & Bordons, 2021;Möller, 2019;Doh et al, 2018). These studies, both specifically reviewing individual and resource factors, were conducted in-depth yet partial, so they fail to provide a more comprehensive understanding in explaining research performance in higher education.…”

“…Collaboration and co-authorship have been essential in developing academic research policies (Aldieri et al, 2020). The studies conducted by Paraskevopoulos et al, (2021) Feng (2020, Inayati (2019), and Sabah et al, (2019) revealed that researchers who possessed more collaboration networks and coauthorships are found to possess a higher number of publications and broader impact factors. In addition, several studies showed that funding effectively improved research performance, mainly related to quality, excellence and impact (Álvarez-Bornstein & Bordons, 2021;Doh et al, 2018;Yang, 2017;Mali et al, 2017).…”