The Effects Of Academic Paper Quality On The Network Positions Of Stars In Co-authorship Network

In the past 20 years or so, the trend of specialization and the cross development of interdisciplinary have promoted the collaboration among the academic researchers. It becomes a common phenomenon in academia that researchers from different institutions, disciplines and regions collaborate and co-publish academic papers. This partnership reflects not only extensive communication and knowledge exchange between researchers, but also the share of academic resources and academic ability. Through labor-division and knowledge-sharing, cooperation between researchers has improved the level and efficiency of research outputs. In addition, by establishing links with core scientists in the network, periphery researchers in the network can improve the impact of their studies by way of co-publishing.In the previous literatures on co-network analysis, most scholars apply social network analysis to map the structural characteristics (such as network density, centrality, cohesion subgroup, small world phenomenon, and core-periphery structure, etc.) of co-authored network in different disciplines. However, these studies mainly analyze research strength and the distribution of research team in academia, few studies investigate the factors which influence the network location of the stars in co-author relationships. Based on the previous studies, this article attempts to explore the connection between the characteristics of academic quality and the network location of stars.In this paper, we will study co-author network in the field of "Innovation Network", where samples mainly come from eight kinds of important academic journals in the area of science and technology management from 1990 to 2012. The network position of the stars can be measured by degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. The net citation of papers, the width of knowledge and the ratio of cross-institution cooperation will be employed to measure the academic paper quality. In addition, we take the time when the first paper was published and co-authored number of papers as control variables, and analyze the influence of the quality characteristics of co-authored papers on the network location of the stars.The results show that:(1) "preferential attachment" will positively affect the network centrality of star-authors; (2) the more citations papers receive, the larger the author’s ego network size; (3) an expert will be more suitable as "knowledge broker";(4) in co-network, the proportion of cross-institution cooperation has a remarkable impact on the closeness centrality of stars in the co-author network.