Being published successfully or getting arXived? The importance of social capital and interdisciplinary collaboration for getting printed in a high impact journal in Physics

Authors : Oliver J. Wieczorek, Mark Wittek, Raphael H. Heiberger

The structure of collaboration is known to be of great importance for the success of scientific endeavors. In particular, various types of social capital employed in co-authored work and projects bridging disciplinary boundaries have attracted researchers’ interest.

Almost all previous studies, however, use samples with an inherent survivor bias, i.e., they focus on papers that have already been published. In contrast, our article examines the chances for getting a working paper published by using a unique dataset of 245,000 papers uploaded to arXiv.

ArXiv is a popular preprint platform in Physics which allows us to construct a co-authorship network from which we can derive different types of social capital and interdisciplinary teamwork.

To emphasize the ‘normal case’ of community-specific standards of excellence, we assess publications in Physics’ high impact journals as success. Utilizing multilevel event history models, our results reveal that already a moderate number of persistent collaborations spanning at least two years is the most important social antecedent of getting a manuscript published successfully.

In contrast, inter- and subdisciplinary collaborations decrease the probability of publishing in an eminent journal in Physics, which can only partially be mitigated by scientists’ social capital.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02148

Choosing Collaboration Partners. How Scientific Success in Physics Depends on Network Positions

Authors : Raphael H. Heiberger, Oliver J. Wieczorek

Physics is one of the most successful endeavors in science. Being a prototypic big science it also reflects the growing tendency for scientific collaborations. Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org a prepublishing platform prevalent in Physics we construct large coauthorship networks to investigate how individual network positions influence scientific success.

In this context, success is seen as getting a paper published in high impact journals of physical subdisciplines as compared to not getting it published at all or in rather peripheral journals only.

To control the nested levels of authors and papers, and to consider the time elapsing between working paper and prominent journal publication we employ multilevel eventhistory models with various network measures as covariates. Our results show that the maintenance of even a moderate number of persistent ties is crucial for scientific success.

Also, even with low volumes of social capital Physicists who occupy brokerage positions enhance their chances of articles in high impact journals significantly. Surprisingly, inter(sub)disciplinary collaborations decrease the probability of getting a paper published in specialized journals for almost all positions.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03251