Kudos to you! Comparing co-authorships and acknowledgements in political science journals from Germany

Abstract

Scientific research on academic collaboration focuses on co-authorships, citations and acknowledgements as 'reward triangle'. However, acknowledgements have received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we compare co-authorship and acknowledgement networks and investigate conditions that influence their formation (gender, institutional affiliation and status of authors and acknowledged individuals). We select three sub-disciplinary political science journals from Germany between 2010 and 2017. We employ techniques from social network analysis to compare these conditions by using homophily measures. The results demonstrate that co-authorships have a rather sparse network while including acknowledgements reveals hidden collaboration structures. Moreover, scholars from the same institution are more likely to co-author and acknowledge each other while we show heterophily effects for acknowledging and co-authoring behavior of professors. We also identify an underrepresentation of female academics as authors and credit-givers alike. Thus, our exploratory study reveals similarities and differences patterns for co-authorships and acknowledgements providing new ground for future studies on all aspects of collaborative behavior in science.