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.
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Notes
The x min value is the highest probability point in the distribution where the power-law begins.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their recommendations of a previous version of the manuscript which helped to improve the methods and results. To Professor David Warton for advice on the use of Smatr 3 routines.
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Ronda-Pupo, G.A., Katz, J.S. The scaling relationship between degree centrality of countries and their citation-based performance on Management Information Systems. Scientometrics 112, 1285–1299 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2459-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2459-y