A global perspective on the social structure of science

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Andrés F. Castro Torres and Vincent Larivière
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Aliakbar Akbaritabar: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Andrés F. Castro Torres: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

No WP-2023-029, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: We reconstruct the career-long productivity, impact, (inter)national collaboration, and (inter)national mobility trajectory of 8.2 million scientists worldwide. We study the interrelationships among four well-established bibliometric claims about academics’ productivity, collaboration, mobility, and visibility. Scrutinizing these claims is only possible with a global perspective simultaneously considering influential bibliometric variables alongside collaboration among scientists. We use Multiple Correspondence Analysis with a combination of 12 widely-used bibliometric variables. We further analyze the networks of collaboration among these authors in the form of a bipartite co-authorship network and detect densely collaborating communities using Constant Potts Model. We found that the claims of literature on increased productivity, collaboration, and mobility are principally driven by a small fraction of influential scientists (top 10%). We find a hierarchically clustered structure with a small top class, and large middle and bottom classes. Investigating the composition of communities of collaboration networks in terms of these top-to-bottom classes and the academic age distribution shows that those at the top succeed by collaborating with a varying group of authors from other classes and age groups. Nevertheless, they are benefiting disproportionately to a much higher degree from this collaboration and its outcome in form of impact and citations.

Keywords: World; inequality; science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab, nep-net and nep-sog
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2023-029

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2023-029

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