Co-authorship networks and research impact: A social capital perspective

The impact of research work is related to a scholar's reputation and future promotions. Greater research impact not only inspires scholars to continue their research, but also increases the possibility of a larger research budget from sponsors. Given the importance of research impact, this study proposes that utilizing social capital embedded in a social structure is an effective way to achieve more research impact. The contribution of this study is to define six indicators of social capital (degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, prolific co-author count, team exploration, and publishing tenure) and investigate how these indicators interact and affect citations for publications. A total of 137 Information Systems scholars from the Social Science Citation Index database were selected to test the hypothesized relationships. The results show that betweenness centrality plays the most important role in taking advantage of non-redundant resources in a co-authorship network, thereby significantly affecting citations for publications. In addition, we found that prolific co-author count, team exploration, and publishing tenure all have indirect effects on citation count. Specifically, co-authoring with prolific scholars helps researchers develop centralities and, in turn, generate higher numbers of citations. Researchers with longer publishing tenure tend to have higher degree centrality. When they collaborate more with different scholars, they achieve more closeness and betweenness centralities, but risk being distrusted by prolific scholars and losing chances to co-author with them. Finally, implications of findings and recommendations for future research are discussed. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.