Stars in a small world: social networks in auditing research

Abstract

This paper investigates the structure of scientific collaboration in auditing research and its impact on the production of published research. To this end, we model networks of authors who published auditing research papers in 12 peer-reviewed accounting and auditing journals from 1997 to 2016. The collaboration network of auditing researchers has a right-skewed degree distribution, according to which there is a small number of authors that each have many coauthors. Moreover, we find that the network of auditing researchers has small-world characteristics that imply a more integrated connectivity among researchers. The small-world phenomenon is shaped by the network stars, i.e., authors who act as intermediaries among their large number of coauthors. We also discover that the star structure affects individual research productivity. The small-world results are robust when our sample is expanded to incorporate accounting research over the same 20-year period.