A new interpretation of scientific collaboration patterns from the perspective of symbiosis: An investigation for long-term collaboration in publications

Junwan Liu, Xiaofei Guo, Shuo Xu, Yinglu Song and Kaiyue Ding

Journal of Informetrics, 2023, vol. 17, issue 1

Abstract: Based on complementarity in terms of factors such as skill and knowledge, researchers might build long-term partnerships with one another during their scientific careers. It has been shown that such relationships have a significant positive impact on researchers’ scientific performance. However, the preferential connection mechanism in collaboration networks actually suggests the unequal positions of participants in the process of scientific collaboration. This study argues that this phenomenon is very similar to the symbiosis function in the natural world. Hence, this work provides a novel interpretation of scientific collaboration patterns from the perspective of symbiosis. In more detail, long-term collaboration relationships are investigated based on the scope of an academician dataset with multiple fields and an economic dataset. With the aid of a quantitative metric for symbiosis degree, six meta-patterns of the short-term evolution of symbiosis degree are proposed. Furthermore, by exploring the evolution of meta-patterns, four scientific collaboration patterns are summarized according to the common characteristics as follows: leading growth, continuous leadership, chasing each other, and standing on equal footing. Extensive experimental results on an academician dataset with multiple fields show that the collaboration network evolution of four collaboration patterns is consistent with our summarized characteristics based on symbiosis. This indicates that our symbiosis-based framework can be used to effectively interpret the developmental and evolutionary trajectories of scientific collaboration.

Keywords: Scientific collaboration pattern; Symbiosis; Symbiosis degree; Symbiosis period; Collaboration network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157722001250
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:17:y:2023:i:1:s1751157722001250

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2022.101372

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().