The Evolutions of the Rich get Richer and the Fit get Richer Phenomena in Scholarly Networks: The Case of the Strategic Management Journal

TL;DR

This study analyzes the evolution of co-authorship and citation networks in the Strategic Management Journal, revealing that author quality influences network growth and that the 'rich get richer' effect is weak but persistent over time.

Contribution

It introduces a non-parametric estimation approach for preferential attachment and author fitness, applying it to real scholarly networks to understand their growth dynamics.

Findings

Weak 'rich get richer' phenomenon in both networks

Author fitness significantly impacts citation and collaboration likelihood

Total competitiveness of networks increases over time

Abstract

Understanding how a scientist develops new scientific collaborations or how their papers receive new citations is a major challenge in scientometrics. The approach being proposed simultaneously examines the growth processes of the co-authorship and citation networks by analyzing the evolutions of the rich get richer and the fit get richer phenomena. In particular, the preferential attachment function and author fitnesses, which govern the two phenomena, are estimated non-parametrically in each network. The approach is applied to the co-authorship and citation networks of the flagship journal of the strategic management scientific community, namely the Strategic Management Journal. The results suggest that the abovementioned phenomena have been consistently governing both temporal networks. The average of the attachment exponents in the co-authorship network is 0.30 while it is 0.29 in the citation network. This suggests that the rich get richer phenomenon has been weak in both networks. The right tails of the distributions of author fitness in both networks are heavy, which imply that the intrinsic scientific quality of each author has been playing a crucial role in getting new citations and new co-authorships. Since the total competitiveness in each temporal network is founded to be rising with time, it is getting harder to receive a new citation or to develop a new collaboration. Analyzing the average competency, it was found that on average, while the veterans tend to be more competent at developing new collaborations, the newcomers are likely better at acquiring new citations. Furthermore, the author fitness in both networks has been consistent with the history of the strategic management scientific community. This suggests that coupling node fitnesses throughout different networks might be a promising new direction in analyzing simultaneously multiple networks.