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Bidirectional relationship between network position and knowledge creation in Scientometrics

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Abstract

Based on the 3100 papers published in the international journal Scientometrics retrieved from Web of Science database over the period 1996–2015, we utilize three-stage least squares (3SLS) to investigate the bidirectional relationship between authors’ network position and knowledge creation. Furthermore, our research is of great benefit to better understanding of the interplay of knowledge and collaboration networks on knowledge creation. The empirical results confirm that the prolific co-authorship and international co-authorship have positive and significant effects on the knowledge creation. The results from the 3SLS estimation models using the number of publications and citations as dependent variables also show that the structural holes of an author in the collaboration networks and her/his knowledge elements in knowledge networks have positive effects on her/his knowledge creation. These findings suggest that structural capital of an author and his/her knowledge elements are important influence factors of the quantity and quality of research output. The results of the models in this paper suggest that authors with better performance in knowledge creation are more likely to attract collaborators and occupy structural holes. In summary, we fill the research gap in exploring the bidirectional relationship between authors’ network positions (in terms of degree centrality and structural holes) and research output.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the Grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71373254 and 71673261) and from The Research Team of Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province in China (2016A030312005). The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers and the Editor of the Journal, which significantly improved the quality of the paper.

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Correspondence to Jiancheng Guan.

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The authors’ names are alphabetically ordered and they contributed equally to this paper.

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Guan, J., Pang, L. Bidirectional relationship between network position and knowledge creation in Scientometrics. Scientometrics 115, 201–222 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2673-2

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