Abstract
We study to what degree and how homophily and network properties affect individual citation counts of researchers in the sociology departments of three East European countries, namely Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. We built first-order personal coauthorship networks out of the Web of Science publication records. Each sociologist is assigned as a focal node or ego, while her coauthors are alters. We analyze the data using structural measurements methods, hierarchical regression models, and we make visualizations based on the clustered graph technique. For all three populations, our results indicate that the mean score of the citations of alters substantially predicts the citation counts of egos. In particular, citation similarity increases the chances for coauthorship ties. Evidence for the impact of network properties on the citation levels of egos is mixed. For Poland, normalized ego-betweenness shows a negative effect on citation counts, while network density displays a positive one. For Romania and Slovenia, network characteristics have only a minor impact. Even if the visual summarization of the personal networks uncovers a wide palette of coauthorship patterns, homophily appears to be pervasive. These results are relevant for domestic policy makers who aim to improve the aggregated research performance in East European countries.
Highlights
Modern social network analysis, generally, builds on the assumption that network patterns have significant consequences for the embedded actors[1]
Personal networks have been of great interest in the study of various topics, such as: social support[27], social protection[28], health[29], social capital[23,30], searching a job[31], migration[26,32] etc
A study conducted on a randomly selected sample of 238 authors from the Web of Science, indicated that, within personal coauthorship networks, betweenness centrality does not have any impact on the Hirsch-index score[19]
Summary
Builds on the assumption that network patterns have significant consequences for the embedded actors[1]. A study conducted on a randomly selected sample of 238 authors from the Web of Science, indicated that, within personal coauthorship networks, betweenness centrality does not have any impact on the Hirsch-index score[19]. It was showed[19] that personal networks’ size (number of alters) significantly accounts for 59% of the h-index scores of the egos.
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