Collaboration matters: Faculty hiring in information school

Abstract

Successful hiring decisions are important for both academic institutions and individual faculty members. While factors including institutional prestige and gender are shown to affect faculty hiring outcome, there is a lack of study on whether and how research collaboration helps. We aimed at bridging this gap with a hand‐curated dataset of 81 junior faculty members from 27 information schools. Specifically, we analysed the effect of advisors and collaborators on faculty placement, controlling for a candidate's h‐index, gender, prestige of degree‐granting institution, and position openings. We found that the median of collaborator h‐indices has a significant and positive effect on the prestige of the institution that hires a faculty. PhD graduates who have co‐authored with high‐impact researchers (other than advisors) are more likely to find faculty positions in better ranked institutions. This reveals an implicit hiring decision‐making factor that encourages young researchers to actively seek collaboration opportunities with well‐established scholars to secure a good faculty job in the future.