Impactful scientists have higher tendency to involve collaborators in new topics.

ABSTRACT: In scientific research, collaboration is one of the most effective ways to take advantage of new ideas, skills, and resources and for performing interdisciplinary research. Although collaboration networks have been intensively studied, the question of how individual scientists choose collaborators to study a new research topic remains almost unexplored. Here, we investigate the statistics and mechanisms of collaborations of individual scientists along their careers, revealing that, in general, collaborators are involved in significantly fewer topics than expected from a controlled surrogate. In particular, we find that highly productive scientists tend to have a higher fraction of single-topic collaborators, while highly cited-i.e., impactful-scientists have a higher fraction of multitopic

SUBMITTER: Zeng A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9388131 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature