The moderating roles of academic age and institutional sector on the relationship between co-authorship network centrality and academic research performance
| Pages | 38-53 |
| Published date | 14 January 2014 |
| Date | 14 January 2014 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-05-2013-0040 |
| Author | Kamal Badar,Julie M. Hite,Yuosre F. Badir |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
The moderating roles of academic
age and institutional sector on the
relationship between
co-authorship network centrality
and academic research
performance
Kamal Badar
Institute of Management Science, University of Balochistan, Quetta, Pakistan
Julie M. Hite
Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations,
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA, and
Yuosre F. Badir
School of Management, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether potentially disadvantaged groups of
researchers derive more research performance benefits from co-authorship network centrality (degree,
closeness and betweenness).
Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds on Badar et al. (2013), which found positive
associations of network centrality on research performance with a moderating relationship of gender
for female authors. Using data from ISI Web of Science (SCI), the authors study the same domestic
co-authorship network of Chemistry researcher in Pakistan publishing from years 2002-2009 and
investigate the moderating role of academic age and institutional sector on the relationship between
co-authorship network centrality (degree, closeness, and betweenness) and the academic research
performance (aggregate impact factor) of chemistry university/institute faculty members in Pakistan.
Findings – Ordinary least squares (OLS)-regression findings indicated a positive relationship
between degree centrality and research performance with a positive moderating relationship for both
academic age and institutional sector on the relationship between degree centrality and research
performance for junior faculty members and faculty members employed in private sector
universities/research institutes.
Practical implications – The findings can be heartening and motivating for junior faculty and
private institute faculty in Pakistan in suggesting opportunities to surpass barriers of domination and
poor resource access through co-authorship ties and structural social capital.
Originality/value – This paper adds to the limited research by strengthening the argument that
potentially disadvantaged facu lty with certain individual (academ ic age) and work-related
characteristics (institutional sector) may benefit differentially from their co-authorship network
centrality.
Keywords Research performance, Academic age, Co-authorship network, Institutional sector,
Moderator impact,Network centrality, Pakistan,Research work, Authorship
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
AJIM
66,1
38
Received 4 May 2013
Revised 1 July 2013
25 August 2013
13 September 2013
Accepted 27 September
2013
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 66 No. 1, 2014
pp. 38-53
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-05-2013-0040
Introduction
Prior social network studies have highlighted the importance of social capital, which is
an existing network of contacts and its associated values. Social capital is based on the
notion that an actor’s relationships (e.g. family members, friends, colleagues, strategic
alliances) comprise an important asset that can be used to gain optimal performance
(Woolcock and Narayan, 2000). Social capital theory provides an insightful conceptual
view (Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998) for understanding social capital and value creation
within a networking context. Accordingly, social capital can be defined as “the set of
social resources embedded in relationships” (Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998).
Three dimensionsof social capital have been defined by Nahapietand Ghoshal (1998):
structural, relational, and cognitive. The structural dimension involves actors’ social
interactions which they use to gain access to resources in the social network. The
relational dimension refers to beliefs and norms that bind people together in a social
network, including aspects such as trust, relational embeddedness, loyalty, friendship,
and respect. The cognitive dimension refers to shared representation and interpretation
of meaning among actorsin the social network, such attributesas shared norms, codes of
action, and convergence of views. Structural social capital overlaps with the concept of
social networkstructure. Often it is pre-requisitefor relational and cognitivedimensions,
based on the argument that network structure is a necessary condition to create the
conduits and bridges to enable the flows of resources between actors and to facilitate
their communication and collaboration (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998).
Talking specifically about co-authorship, a rich stream of scientometric literature aims
at analyzing co-authorship patterns using bibliometric (Bakri and Willett, 2011;
Sadat-Moosavi et al., 2012) and social network analysis (SNA) techniques
(Chinchilla-Rodrı
´guez et al., 2012; Cantos-Mateos et al., 2012; Ding, 2011; Newman,
2004a, b; Ocholla et al., 2012; Otte and Rousseau, 2002). It has long been realized that the
co-authorship of articles in academic journals provides a perspective on patterns of
collaboration within the academic community (Newman, 2004a, b). Co-authorship of a
paper can be defined as a documented collaboration between two or more authors. A
substantial body of work in bibliometrics aims at extraction of collaboration patterns from
publication data drawn from publicly available databases (e.g. Web of Science) of papers
(Chinchilla-Rodrı
´guez et al., 2012; Cantos-Mateos et al., 2012; Ding, 2011; Ocholla et al.,
2012; Newman, 2004a, b; Otte and Rousseau, 2002). These collaborations tend to form a
co-authorship network which can comfortably be placed in the domain of social networks
(Chinchilla-Rodrı
´guez et al., 2012; Cantos-Mateos et al., 2012; Ding, 2011; Newman, 2004a,
b; Ocholla et al., 2012; Otte and Rousseau, 2002) with authors being the nodes in the
network and relationship between them established when they co-author a paper
(Newman, 2004a, b). Social capital in co-authorship networks can hence be conceptualized
in terms of network structures, such as those explained by network centrality theory
(Burt, 1992; Freeman, 1979). Such social capital has been associated with the authors’
research performance (Abbasi et al., 2011; Badar et al., 2013; Fischbach et al., 2011; Lee
et al., 2012; Liao, 2011). Network centrality specifies structurally advantageous positions
of an actor in the network (Bhardwaj et al., 2008), positions which capture the structural
dimension of social capital (Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998) and can be calculated using SNA.
While the social network and social capital paradigms focus on actors’
relationships, the importance of actors’ attributes in shaping differential payoffs
from structural social capital cannot be ignored (Bhardwaj et al., 2008; Burt, 1998; Lee
Co-authorship
network
centrality
39
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