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Academic careers in Computer Science: continuance and transience of lifetime co-authorships

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Abstract

Scholarly publications reify fruitful collaborations between co-authors. A branch of research in the science studies focuses on analyzing the co-authorship networks of established scientists. Such studies tell us about how their collaborations developed through their careers. This paper updates previous work by reporting a transversal and a longitudinal studies spanning the lifelong careers of a cohort of researchers from the DBLP bibliographic database. We mined 3,860 researchers’ publication records to study the evolution patterns of their co-authorships. Two features of co-authors were considered: (1) their expertise, and (2) the history of their partnerships with the sampled researchers. Our findings reveal the ephemeral nature of most collaborations: 70 % of the new co-authors were only one-shot partners since they did not appear to collaborate on any further publications. Overall, researchers consistently extended their co-authorships (1) by steadily enrolling beginning researchers (i.e., people who had never published before), and (2) by increasingly working with confirmed researchers with whom they already collaborated.

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Notes

  1. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/.

  2. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/~ley/faq/Data+in+dblp.html.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the French National Agency for Research (ANR-11-BSH1-0013). We acknowledge the feedback of James Hartley and András Schubert on an earlier version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Guillaume Cabanac & Gilles Hubert

  2. Department of Sociology, LISST UMR 5193 CNRS, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Béatrice Milard

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  1. Guillaume Cabanac
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Correspondence to Guillaume Cabanac.

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Cabanac, G., Hubert, G. & Milard, B. Academic careers in Computer Science: continuance and transience of lifetime co-authorships. Scientometrics 102, 135–150 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1426-0

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