Informal Research Ties “More Important” Than Co-Authorship

Being thanked in a paper’s acknowledgments is a better predictor of publication success than prolific co-authorship, according to a study that highlights the importance of participating in the “invisible college” that determines academic fortunes.

Although scientometric studies have long confirmed the importance of having broad and preferably international co-authorship, scholars have suggested that the thank-you section at the end of a journal paper could be a more reliable guide to who is truly significant in a discipline.

Analyzing the acknowledgments section of every available political science paper published over a 20-year period, researchers found that “informal ties are a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., co-authorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige.”

The study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports that about a quarter of scholars were not mentioned in any acknowledgments and exhibited “significantly lower publication success on standard citation metrics.”

With informal ties described as a “key predictor of publication impact,” the study found that these links helped form an “invisible college” that enables some academics to acquire a “form of social capital that allows scholars to draw advice and feedback from a broader range of colleagues than those formally linked through co-authorship.”

But access to these informal links is “unevenly distributed” and such inequalities could “reinforce stratification within academia,” says the study, titled, “Informal connections outweigh co-authorship ties in academic impact,” which analyzed more than 130,000 political science articles published by 86,000 authors between 2003 and 2023.

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, director of the Center for Information Networks and Democracy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the study, said the research showed how “we are likely underrepresenting how much we rely on ‘helpful colleagues’” and that it “takes a village to produce research with impact.”

“Our paper emphasizes other types of impact that receive far less attention [than citations], such as how helpful scholars are in helping peers through their feedback,” she said.

Asked if these different measures of impact are more meaningful than traditional metrics, such as h-indexes, which measure citation counts, Gonzalez-Bailon said attempts to quantify the “informal structures of support [could be used as] an alternative measure of impact, not a substitute.”

“Impact measures like the h-index are still relevant and useful, but [are] not the only ones that can or should be used to measure contributions to a field,” she said.

More generally, the study indicated that time spent helping other scientists or researchers with their work often pays off, although this return is generally not seen, said Gonzalez-Bailon.

“Building social capital always takes effort, and our paper references how much time and ink prominent scientists like Darwin or Einstein devoted to these informal exchanges, in their case via handwritten letters,” she said. “One of the conclusions of our study certainly is: Invest some of your energy in building structures of support; the investment will pay.

“Exchanging ideas with peers helps increase the quality of the work, but participating in those exchanges takes time and effort and, therefore, intellectual generosity. I always tell my students to be generous more than strategic,” she added.