Social networks and research output

We study how knowledge about the social network of an individual researcher - as embodied in his co-author relations - helps us in developing a more accurate prediction of his future productivity. We find that incorporating information about co-author networks leads to a modest improvement in the accuracy of forecasts on individual output, over and above what we can predict based on the knowledge of past individual output. Second, we find that the informativeness of networks dissipates over the lifetime of a researcher's career. This suggests that the signalling content of the network is quantitatively more important than the flow of ideas.

© 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.