Cumulative Advantage of Brokerage in Academia

TL;DR

This paper investigates how brokerage roles in academic collaborations influence physicists' career success, revealing a cumulative advantage that benefits early-career scientists and affects gender disparities.

Contribution

It quantifies academic brokerage and demonstrates its role in career trajectories, highlighting its potential to reduce inequalities in scientific success.

Findings

Early-career brokerage participation boosts later success for all researchers.

Brokerage contributes to the unequal distribution of academic success.

The effect of brokerage is similar for women and men, despite gender disparities in roles.

Abstract

Science is a collaborative endeavor in which "who collaborates with whom" profoundly influences scientists' career trajectories and success. Despite its relevance, little is known about how scholars facilitate new collaborations among their peers. In this study, we quantify brokerage in academia and study its effect on the careers of physicists worldwide. We find that early-career participation in brokerage increases later-stage involvement for all researchers, with increasing participation rates and greater career impact among more successful scientists. This cumulative advantage process suggests that brokerage contributes to the unequal distribution of success in academia. Surprisingly, this affects both women and men equally, despite women being more junior in all brokerage roles and lagging behind men's participation due to their late and slow arrival to physics. Because of its cumulative nature, promoting brokerage opportunities to early career scientists might help reduce the inequalities in academic success.