Collaboration Signatures Reveal Scientific Impact

Abstract

Collaboration is an integral element of the scientific process that often leads to findings with significant impact. While extensive efforts have been devoted to quantifying and predicting research impact, the question of how collaborative behavior influences scientific impact remains unaddressed. In this work, we study the interplay between scientists' collaboration signatures and their scientific impact. As the basis of our study, we employ an ArnetMiner dataset with more than 1.7 million authors and 2 million papers spanning over 60 years. We formally define a scientist's collaboration signature as the distribution of collaboration strengths with each collaborator in his or her academic ego network, which is quantified by four measures: sociability, dependence, diversity, and self-collaboration. We then demonstrate that the collaboration signature allows us to effectively distinguish between researchers with dissimilar levels of scientific impact. We also discover that, even from the early stages of one's researcher career, a scientist's collaboration signature can help to reveal his or her future scientific impact. Finally, we find that as a representative group of outstanding computer scientists, Turing Award winners collectively produce distinctive collaboration signatures throughout the entirety of their careers. Our conclusions on the relationship between collaboration signatures and scientific impact give rise to important implications for researchers who wish to expand their scientific impact and more effectively stand on the shoulders of "collaborators."

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