Abstract
By exploiting the cancellation of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, we investigate the role of conferences in facilitating academic collaboration. We assembled data sets comprising 17,467 academics, and in difference‐in‐differences analysis we find that the conference cancellation led to a decrease in individuals’ likelihood of co‐authoring an article with another attendant by 16%. Moreover, collaborations formed among attendants of (occurring) conferences are associated with more successful co‐publications: an effect which is sharpest for teams that are new or non‐collocated. Conferences seem to de‐cluster the co‐authorship network. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the importance of conferences in scientific production.
Highlights
The APSA is a professional association of political science in the United States, and it publishes one of the preeminent journals in its field: The American Political Science Review
An individual who attended three conferences appears, in our data set, as one individual – ‘Adam Adams’ – and as three conference-authors: ‘APSA2009-Adam Adams’, ‘MPSA2011-Adam Adams’ and ‘APSA2012-Adam Adams’.) In our analysis, we examine the data at two levels: (i) at the conference-author level in which the outcome is an indicator for whether the individual comes to collaborate with someone in the same conference; and (ii) at the conference-author pair level, where the outcome is whether the pair collaborates after the conference
In subsection 2.3, we introduce some basic network analysis as a step to understanding the mechanisms underlying the results
Summary
The APSA is a professional association of political science in the United States, and it publishes one of the preeminent journals in its field: The American Political Science Review. Its Annual Meeting is held immediately preceding Labor Day (in September) and gathers authors (from more than 700 institutions) of close to 3,000 working papers to be presented in 52 main themes, encompassing a very broad spectrum of approaches and research topics across the field of political science. The 2012 APSA meeting was due to take place in New Orleans and was scheduled to start on August 30. It was cancelled at less than 48 hours’ notice due to the approach of ‘Hurricane Isaac’. Our main hypothesis is that the individuals within this group (named in the 2012 APSA Meeting Programme) became less likely to form subsequent in-group collaborations than individuals in the groups that attended occurring conferences
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