The Rich get Richer and the Fit get Richer Phenomena in Temporal Complex Networks in the Strategic Management Scientific Community

The aim of this paper is to determine the general preferential attachment function and author fitness in the temporal complex co-authorship and citation networks of the strategic management scientific community. These are often described as the rich get richer and the fit get richer phenomena. This has been done by means of the PAFit method using the community's flagship journal, namely Strategic Management Journal. The results suggest the co-authorship and citation temporal networks are governed by both the fit get richer and the rich get richer processes. The attachment exponent of the preferential attachment function of the co-authorship network in the time span 2010-2017 is 1.12, which means that the co-authorship network of that time span is described by 'the winner takes all' phenomenon: all new entrants to the co-authorship network will enter through the highest connected authors. On the other hand, the average of the attachment exponents in the citation network is 0.3, which suggests the rich get richer phenomenon in the citation network is weaker than in the co-authorship network. This implies that the intrinsic scientific quality of each author is more important in getting new citations than co-authorship. Furthermore, author fitness in both co-authorship and citation networks are found to be consistent with the history of the strategic management scientific community.