Homophily in coauthorship networks of East European sociologists

Abstract

We study to what degree and how homophily and network properties affect individual citation counts of researchers in the sociology departments of three East European countries, namely Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. We built first-order personal coauthorship networks out of the Web of Science publication records. Each sociologist is assigned as a focal node or ego, while her coauthors are alters. We analyze the data using structural measurements methods, hierarchical regression models, and we make visualizations based on the clustered graph technique. For all three populations, our results indicate that the mean score of the citations of alters substantially predicts the citation counts of egos. In particular, citation similarity increases the chances for coauthorship ties. Evidence for the impact of network properties on the citation levels of egos is mixed. For Poland, normalized ego-betweenness shows a negative effect on citation counts, while network density displays a positive one. For Romania and Slovenia, network characteristics have only a minor impact. Even if the visual summarization of the personal networks uncovers a wide palette of coauthorship patterns, homophily appears to be pervasive. These results are relevant for domestic policy makers who aim to improve the aggregated research performance in East European countries.

Who is researching biodiversity hotspots in Eastern Europe? A case study on grasslands from Romania

“…International collaborations are increasingly possible and encouraged, e.g., within Horizon 2020 and Biodiversa-EraNet project partnerships (Granieri and Renda 2012). These collaborations can allow knowledge flow, the development of new coauthorship networks (Hancean and Perc 2016) and also can buffer the unstable funding which characterizes Romanian research (Miclaus and Micu 2018). Our results suggest several ways in which a local researcher can increase its attractivity for international research projects, including a keen interest in a holistic understanding of the cultural landscapes (of which grasslands are part), active and long-term engagement with local stakeholders and partners and increased scientific productivity (Balvanera et al 2017).…”

“…We calculated the network fragmentation metric, which in our case indicates the proportion of pairs of authors that cannot reach each other (Borgatti et al 2018). Large datasets, as it is the case of our database, typically involve many small independent clusters around larger ones and one large and dense cluster (Hancean and Perc 2016). Thus, we assessed the distribution of components in the co-authorship network and extracted the largest connected component (main component) that shows the group of highly active authors focused on grasslands at the national level (subnetworks of authors that are maximally connected between each other).…”

“…Collaboration between academics and knowledge creation have been extensively studied using network analysis framework. Analyses span from understanding of patterns of scientific collaboration as resulted from co-authorship and institutional networks (Newman 2004, Hancean et al 2014, Hancean and Perc 2016) to knowledge creation (Wang 2016), to prediction of productivity (Barabási et al 2002) or trends (Chen et al 2010). In this paper we use network analysis, to characterize the status of scientific research in the field of grassland governance in Romania and suggests ways to improve scientific performance by: 1) revealing internationally visible research around Romania’s grasslands published after 1990; 2) highlighting most important institutions generating the research, and mapping the invisible authors and academic leaders as resulted from the co-authorship network, and 3) analyzing the co-occurrence keyword network to discover the most common keywords, research topics, and scientific interest.…”

Is science driven by principal investigators?

“…Karlovčec et al (2016) used machine learning approach to study the transition behaviour of researchers between core and periphery in the Slovenian research network. Hâncean and Perc (2016) studied how different network properties affect citation counts of sociologists of East European countries including Slovenia. Results indicated that the score of the citations of a researcher could be clearly predicted by the citation counts of her co-authors.…”

Collaboration patterns in the German political science co-authorship network

“…Furthermore, and in line with the findings of Plümper [33] as outlined above, political science institutes vary strongly in their international visibility. In the neighboring discipline of sociology, co-authorship networks were recently investigated in Romania [39] as well as in Poland, Romania and Slovenia [40]. …”