The scaling relationship between degree centrality of countries and their citation-based performance on Management Information Systems

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the power-law relationship between the degree centrality of countries and their citation-based performance in Management Information Systems research. We analyzed 27,662 articles that received 127,974 citations. The distribution of the citation-based performance follows a power law with exponent of −2.46 ± 0.05. The distribution of the centrality degree of countries follows a power law with exponent of −2.26 ± 0.24. The citation-based performance and degree centrality exhibited a power-law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.22 ± 0.04. Citations to the articles of a country in MIS tend to increase 21.22 or 2.33 times each time it doubles its degree centrality in the international collaborative network. Policies that encourage a country to increase its degree centrality in a collaboration network can disproportionately increase the impact of its research.