Want to succeed in academia? Build a network beyond your co-authors
Researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication have analyzed the ‘thank you’ notes in 129,750 political science journal articles and find that informal connections between authors are more predictive of higher productivity and impact than formal connections.
2 min. read
Is one type of collaboration more crucial than the other? To answer this question, a team of researchers led by Lluís Danús, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND), and Sandra González-Bailón, co-director of CIND and Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication, have analyzed 129,750 political science journal articles by around 86,000 authors from 2003 to 2023. The team, which also includes political science professor Guy Grossman, look at the formal connections between authors (co-authorship) and their informal connections, using the acknowledgments appended to the publications.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that informal ties create a larger and denser network of support than co-authorship ties and are a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations. The disconnection from informal networks is associated with lower academic productivity and publication impact even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige.
“Academic performance relies on a special type of social capital known as the ‘invisible college,’ the informal networks of scholars who exchange ideas, collaborate, and influence the direction of knowledge,” says first author Lluís Danús. “Research has mostly analyzed co-authorship structures as a way to track these relationships, but we found that looking at the ‘thank you’ notes in the acknowledgment section of published articles provides additional insight: these informal networks are larger, less hierarchical, and show a stronger association with scholarly impact than co-authorship ties.”
For the study, the research team built two longitudinal networks: one mapping co-authorship connections and the other mapping the acknowledgment ties. They used these networks to measure centrality in formal and informal support structures—and to identify disconnected scholars.
The researchers collected additional information on each scholar’s gender, seniority, the prestige of the institution they are affiliated with, geographical region, and methodological orientation. They also compiled three measures of publication success: the number of articles published, the h-index, and the Euclid citation scores, all measures of productivity and impact.
The researchers found that embeddedness in informal networks of academic exchange (those captured by the acknowledgment ties) is a key predictor of publication impact.
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