Investigating the impact of collaboration with authority authors: a case study of bibliographic data in field of philosophy

Abstract

In many natural science domains, while collaboration is inevitably becoming a vital factor for success, cultivating new promising researchers is becoming a by-product of this process. Young researchers or doctorate candidates can grow up quickly by the tutor's instructions, advanced experimental environment and fierce competition among themselves. In an existing study, we explored the premise that collaboration with an expert in the field can lead to success in the field of computer science. Other fields in natural science may yield results similar to computer science domain, however, domains such as philosophy, where successful scholars, rather than working on scientific articles, prefer spending more time in book writing and delivering lectures and seminars, may produce different results. This study attempts to find the effect of collaboration of top-class researchers on the career of junior researchers of philosophy from a dataset extracted from Ebrary and Scopus ranging from 2000 to 2016. The results of the study depict a relationship between the co-authorship with a top researcher of the field and the success in terms of impact. Results demonstrate that authors who collaborated with highly influential authority authors at an early stage of their career happened to be less productive at initial stages and more productive in later stages as compared to authors who worked with authority authors in later stages. The later ones gained more visibility in terms of citations, with high sociability at later stages and more longevity. However, there is a big number of philosophers who worked independently and still found to be highly productive and successful.