Forecasting Faculty Placement from Patterns in Co-authorship Networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating co-authorship network data significantly enhances the accuracy of predicting faculty placement outcomes, especially at elite institutions, revealing the importance of social networks in academic hiring.

Contribution

It introduces a novel predictive framework for faculty placement that leverages co-authorship networks, surpassing traditional indicators in accuracy and highlighting social influence in hiring.

Findings

Co-authorship networks improve placement prediction accuracy by up to 10%.

Largest gains are at top-10 elite departments.

Social networks influence faculty hiring beyond traditional metrics.

Abstract

Faculty hiring shapes the flow of ideas, resources, and opportunities in academia, influencing not only individual career trajectories but also broader patterns of institutional prestige and scientific progress. While traditional studies have found strong correlations between faculty hiring and attributes such as doctoral department prestige and publication record, they rarely assess whether these associations generalize to individual hiring outcomes, particularly for future candidates outside the original sample. Here, we consider faculty placement as an individual-level prediction task. Our data consist of temporal co-authorship networks with conventional attributes such as doctoral department prestige and bibliometric features. We observe that using the co-authorship network significantly improves predictive accuracy by up to 10% over traditional indicators alone, with the largest gains observed for placements at the most elite (top-10) departments. Our results underscore the role that social networks, professional endorsements, and implicit advocacy play in faculty hiring beyond traditional measures of scholarly productivity and institutional prestige. By introducing a predictive framing of faculty placement and establishing the benefit of considering co-authorship networks, this work provides a new lens for understanding structural biases in academia that could inform targeted interventions aimed at increasing transparency, fairness, and equity in academic hiring practices.