The Scientometrics and Reciprocality Underlying Co-Authorship Panels in Google Scholar Profiles

TL;DR

This study analyzes Google Scholar profiles to understand how scientometrics and reciprocality influence co-author selections for profiles, revealing preferences for high scientometric co-authors and the importance of reciprocal relationships.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of co-authorship panel selection, highlighting the roles of scientometrics and reciprocality in scholarly social networks.

Findings

Scholars prefer co-authors with higher scientometrics.

Higher own scientometrics reduces preference for high-scientometric co-authors.

Reciprocal relationships significantly influence co-author selection.

Abstract

Online academic profiles are used by scholars to reflect a desired image to their online audience. In Google Scholar, scholars can select a subset of co-authors for presentation in a central location on their profile using a social feature called the Co-authroship panel. In this work, we examine whether scientometrics and reciprocality can explain the observed selections. To this end, we scrape and thoroughly analyze a novel set of 120,000 Google Scholar profiles, ranging across four disciplines and various academic institutions. Our results suggest that scholars tend to favor co-authors with higher scientometrics over others for inclusion in their co-authorship panels. Interestingly, as one's own scientometrics are higher, the tendency to include co-authors with high scientometrics is diminishing. Furthermore, we find that reciprocality is central to explaining scholars' selections.