Is Performance of Scholars Correlated to Their Research Collaboration Patterns?

Abstract

This study aims to validate whether the research performance of scholars correlates with how the scholars work together. Although the most straightforward approaches are centrality measurements or community detection, scholars mostly participate in multiple research groups and have different roles in each group. Thus, we concentrate on the subgraphs of co-authorship networks rooted in each scholar that cover (i) overlapping of the research groups on the scholar and (ii) roles of the scholar in the groups. This study calls the subgraphs "collaboration patterns" and applies subgraph embedding methods to discover and represent the collaboration patterns. Based on embedding the collaboration patterns, we have clustered scholars according to their collaboration styles. Then, we have examined whether scholars in each cluster have similar research performance, using the quantitative indicators. The coherence of the indicators cannot be solid proofs for validating the correlation between collaboration and performance. Nevertheless, the examination for clusters has exhibited that the collaboration patterns can reflect research styles of scholars. This information will enable us to predict the research performance more accurately since the research styles are more consistent and sustainable features of scholars than a few high-impact publications.

Interinstitutional Research Team Formation Based on Bibliographic Network Embedding

“…ey extracted various features from research publications or bibliographic networks by searching for scholars who can potentially (or sustainably [20,21]) collaborate. Structures of bibliographic networks provide various information for bibliographic entities (e.g., scholars, publications, and venues) [1,5,6]. Regarding scholars, coauthorship relations show which types of collaborators are preferred by each scholar [1].…”

“…Research collaborations are one of primary features that affect performances of the research [1][2][3][4][5][6].…”

“…ese studies searched for adequate collaboration partners of each scholar by analyzing his/her research history. ey supposed that structures of bibliographic networks reflect reputations (e.g., the number of citations), research topics (e.g., preferred venues), and even working styles (e.g., sustainability of collaborations) of scholars [1,5,6].…”

“…Finally, structures of the bibliographic networks represent more detailed research styles of the scholars, such as whether they focus on a few high-quality papers or write prolifically [5,6]. Also, the structures can reveal working styles of research groups; for example, all group members focus on a research topic, the group leader manages multiple independent projects, or plural middle managers lead individual projects [1]. erefore, in this study, we propose a method for forming research teams that can consider both collaboration styles of individual scholars and aims of research institutes by embedding bibliographic networks.…”

“…is network includes information for research institutes and projects funded by the institutes, which are barely dealt with by the existing studies. en, we apply the substructure-based graph embedding methods [1,[13][14][15][16] for representing scholars, publications, venues, research institutes, and projects with a fixed-size vector. Collaboration probabilities between scholars are estimated based on the vector representations.…”