Analyzing Academic Communities’ Collaboration and Performance

Recently, there has been a sharp increase on the scholars’ collaborations and there are pros and cons by the effect of scientific collaboration on each scholar’ performance. Most of previous researches study the microlevel collaboration network to investigate the effects of scholars’ collaboration network structure on their performance but to our knowledge there so few macro-level collaboration network studies to evaluate the association between academic communities network structure and the communities’ academic performance. In this study, we analyze scientific collaboration network structure and network attributes of five information schools and test if there is any link between them and their academic performance. Analysis of collected data shows that the communities’ which are lower density and lower network degree centrality (more decentralized) have higher performance. This could be as a result of share more redundant knowledge in the dense and centralized scientific collaboration networks, which is an obstacle for innovation and new ideas.