Understanding super-partnerships in scientific collaboration: Evidence from the field of economics

Abstract

Super-partnerships exist between scholars connected within densely-knit collaboration networks. Understanding how such relationships affect scholars' careers is of great importance. In this paper, focusing on the longitudinal aspects of scientific collaboration, we analyze collaboration profiles from the egocentric perspective and use analytic extreme value thresholds to identify super-partners. A total of 5722 pairs of super-partners are found in the field of economics. The several interesting findings about super-partners are summarized as follows. (1) The collaboration pattern of super-partners can be divided into three types: the dual-core, bridge, and triangle types. (2) Gender disparities are reflected in the collaboration among super-partners, and the stability of super-partnerships involving different combinations of genders displays different characteristics. The random-effect model is constructed to explore the effect of a super-partnership on both parties from the aspects of productivity and influence, which also shows gender disparities. (3) A super-partnership contributes to above-average productivity and citation impacts of the publication for three collaboration patterns, and the research improvement of the triangle type is the greatest among the three types. Overall, this paper explores the characteristics of super-partners and the added value of a long-term commitment, which provides quantitative insights into the effect on scientific collaboration associated with close collaboration.