Analyzing Frequent Collaborators in the IS Field: What Can We Learn about IS Coauthorship in General?

Despite the longstanding nature of social network theory and its application to research on communication technologies, few IS studies employ social network analysis (SNA) concepts; the few that do are by organizational communication scholars. A recent stream of work by IS scholars is to apply SNA to study research collaboration – although this has mostly focused on individual IS conferences. We analyze frequent coauthors in five IS journals from 1999-2007 to show that most of these frequent coauthors primarily publish with their PhD students (what I label “supervisory coauthorship”). Two-thirds of frequent coauthors with 7 or more distinct partners mostly publish with their former PhD students, while less than one-third mostly publish with peer scholars. Nearly 85% of frequent coauthors were affiliated with North American institutions; two or more were located in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. We offer insights about the high rate of coauthorship in IS journals.