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Co-authorship networks in electronic markets research

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Abstract

This article examines co-authorship networks of researchers publishing in Electronic Markets—The International Journal of Networked Business (EM). The authors visualize the co-authorship network and provide descriptive statistics regarding the degree to which researchers are embedded in the co-authorship network. They develop and test seven hypotheses associating the researchers’ embeddedness in the co-authorship network with the number of the researchers’ citations. Results indicate that author who publish co-authored articles in EM have their EM articles (whether co-authored or not) cited more frequently than those who publish EM articles only in their own names, and that the more they co-author the more they are cited because they are located in the center of a co-authorship network.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we regard scientometrics, bibliometrics, and informetrics as the same discipline. We refer the interested reader to a literature review by Hood and Wilson (2001) for a distinction between these three streams of thoughts. However, as Hood and Wilson (2001, p. 293) acknowledge, “much of scientometrics is indistinguishable from bibliometrics, and much bibliometric research is published in the journal, Scientometrics”.

  2. We refer the interested reader to Peters and Van Raan (1991) and Newman (2004) for a further discussion of the computation of x ij in scientometric analyses.

  3. In most cases, the distinction / classification of editorials and prefaces is unequivocal, because both type of papers appear only once in a particular issue of EM. However, some papers were labelled as “editorials” in EM (and also classified as such by the authors) although they had the characteristics of a preface, which serves as an opening piece to highlight the content of a special topic and is written by a guest editor or editors (e.g. Lechner et al. 2000). We also identified two interviews that had the characteristics of a preface and, hence, classified them as such (Dai and Kauffman 2002; Österle and Schmid 2008).

  4. For example, the same character ID was assigned to “Archer, Norm” and “Archer, Norman P.”.

  5. This is a problem we have faced frequently in other studies that examine large social networks without unique actors’ IDs. We suggest researchers support initiatives that foster unique universal author IDs (that would also remain the same, for example, after changing names after marriage).

  6. A component is defined as a maximal sub-graph in which any two co-authors are connected by a sequence of dyads that have published a paper together (called “path”).

  7. We visualized this network using a force directed algorithm that is, in its full extent, beyond the scope of this paper. The interested reader is referred to a book edited by Kaufmann and Wagner (2001) for an introduction to graph drawing algorithms.

  8. Paul Erdös was a famous Hungarian mathematician who published more than 1,000 papers. His productivity was paid tribute to by the so called “Erdös number” that indicates the distance of an author to Erdös via a chain of co-authors. Authors who published a paper jointly with Erdös were assigned the Erdös number of 1, their collaborators was assigned the Erdös number of 2, and so on.

  9. The formulas for identifying cliques are beyond the scope of this paper due to place constraints. The interested reader is referred to the referenced literature.

  10. EM has been so ranked by the Australian Research Councils’s (ARC) Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative (ERA) (http://www.arc.gov.au/era/), in the common journal ranking of the Center of Excellence for IS Research in the German Academic Association for Business Research (WKWI VHB), and by German Society for Computer Sciences (GI) (“WI-Orientierungslisten 2008”).

  11. For example, René Wagenaar passed away unexpectedly just after completing a research project published in EM (Fielt et al. 2008).

  12. “A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np - h) papers have ≤ h citations each” (Hirsch 2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems and Information Management, University of Cologne, Pohligstr. 1, Köln, D-50969, Germany

    Kai Fischbach, Johannes Putzke & Detlef Schoder

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  1. Kai Fischbach
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  2. Johannes Putzke
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Correspondence to Johannes Putzke.

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Fischbach, K., Putzke, J. & Schoder, D. Co-authorship networks in electronic markets research. Electron Markets 21, 19–40 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-011-0051-5

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