Egocentric analysis of co-authorship network structure, position and performance

In this study, we propose and validate social networks based theoretical model for exploring scholars’ collaboration (co-authorship) network properties associated with their citation-based research performance (i.e., g-index). Using structural holes theory, we focus on how a scholar’s egocentric network properties of density, efficiency and constraint within the network associate with their scholarly performance. For our analysis, we use publication data of high impact factor journals in the field of “Information Science & Library Science” between 2000 and 2009, extracted from Scopus. The resulting database contained 4837 publications reflecting the contributions of 8069 authors. Results from our data analysis suggest that research performance of scholars’ is significantly correlated with scholars’ ego-network measures. In particular, scholars with more co-authors and those who exhibit higher levels of betweenness centrality (i.e., the extent to which a co-author is between another pair of co-authors) perform better in terms of research (i.e., higher g-index). Furthermore, scholars with efficient collaboration networks who maintain a strong co-authorship relationship with one primary co-author within a group of linked co-authors (i.e., co-authors that have joint publications) perform better than those researchers with many relationships to the same group of linked co-authors.