Understanding success through the diversity of collaborators and the milestone of career

Abstract

Scientific collaboration is vital to many fields, and it is common to see scholars seek out experienced researchers or experts in a domain with whom they can share knowledge, experience, and resources. To explore the diversity of research collaborations, this article performs a temporal analysis on the scientific careers of researchers in the field of computer science. Specifically, we analyze collaborators using 2 indicators: the research topic diversity, measured by the Author-Conference-Topic model and cosine, and the impact diversity, measured by the normalized standard deviation of h-indices. We find that the collaborators of high-impact researchers tend to study diverse research topics and have diverse h-indices. Moreover, by setting PhD graduation as an important milestone in researchers' careers, we examine several indicators related to scientific collaboration and their effects on a career. The results show that collaborating with authoritative authors plays an important role prior to a researcher's PhD graduation, but working with nonauthoritative authors carries more weight after PhD graduation.

Analyzing scientific collaboration with “giants” based on the milestones of career

“…However, it does not seem that the more collaborations with AAs, the more successful the authors, especially five and ten years after their PhD graduation. One of the interpretations concerning this finding is that there is potential for the "halo effects" of AAs to "outshine" junior scholars and to some extent fetter their development (Bu et al, 2018b). This finding warns us that collaborations with "giants" are not always as beneficial as we might think, especially at the beginning of our careers.…”

“…Moreover, senior researchers show greater variation in the number of co-authors per publication than younger scholars who tend to have similar numbers of co-authors across articles (Hamermesh, 2015). Bu et al (2018b) divided the high-impact researchers' careers into two parts: before and after Ph.D graduation, and found different collaboration patterns in each stage, corresponding to findings of previous research (Krapt, 2015). Moreover, in different stages of career, the division of tasks in a collaboration is also different; specifically, as pointed out by Kumar and Ratnavelu (2016), the load of tasks is "predominantly on the shoulders of the mentees" (p. 14) (or junior researchers) instead of mentors (or senior researchers) who instead provide guidance to their research assistants, postdoctoral scholars, and PhD students.…”

Global village or virtual balkans? evolution and performance of scientific collaboration in the information age

“…Apart from these trends, many previous studies support that scientific collaboration has positive impacts on individuals, institutions, and countries (Bu et al, ; Li & Li, ). The fundamental need for scientific collaboration is accessing skills, knowledge, and other necessary resources for research (Beaver, ; Birnholtz, ).…”

“…Although there are findings against whether collaboration has a positive affect on research productivity (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2009;Lee & Bozeman, 2005), many studies support that scientific collaboration could enhance research impact and breed innovation (Wuchty, Jones, & Uzzi, 2007;Ding, 2011;Bozeman & Boardman, 2014;Larivie`re et al, 2015). Furthermore, many scholars believe that scientific collaboration is helpful in building reputation and establishing a successful career path, which significantly motivates scholars who are seeking being visible and recognized (Amjad et al, 2017;Bu et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2018).…”

From zero to one: A perspective on citing

“…The data used in this article are derived from the ArnetMiner data set, which covers the most important articles in conferences and journals from the domain of computer science (Bu et al, ; Li et al, ; Tang et al, , ). There are approximately one million articles published between 1936 and 2014 in the data set.…”