Informal Support Networks in Science

Largest connected component (all nodes) and its largest bicomponent (red nodes) in the coauthorship network (left) and the largest strong component (all nodes), its largest bicomponent (yellow), and largest 3-component (red) in the acknowledgement network (right).

Abstract

The size of collaborative teams in the production of scientific knowledge has been on the rise across a broad range of fields over decades. Despite this transition to big science, re-cent studies highlight the persisting relevance of smaller collaborative teams for their po-tential to produce disruptive knowledge. This paper develops an explanation for the dis-ruptiveness of small teams based on the diverse intellectual resources that scientists in small teams obtain from their loose network of informal support in the process of manag-ing resource constraints that small teams face. Using scholarly acknowledgements (i.e., signs of informal support) contained in the articles published in 10 leading sociology journals between 2000 and 2009, I construct a directed network of acknowledgements between scholars and compare its structure against their coauthorship network. The acknowledgement network exhibits a more cohesive structure conducive to facilitating circulating intellectual resources (e.g., ideas, tools, methods) to a larger portion of scholars located in diverse subfields. At the individual level, scholars who are central in the net-work of informal support tend to collaborate in smaller teams and publish more disruptive articles.

Article link: Complex Networks & Their Applications