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Homophily in higher education research: a perspective based on co-authorships

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Abstract

Research collaborations are the norm in science today, and are usually evaluated using co-authorships as the unit of analysis. Research collaborations have been typically analyzed using a mapping perspective that focuses on countries, institutions, or individuals, or by assessments of the determinants of research collaboration, i.e., who engages in collaborations and who collaborates the most. One analytical perspective that has been used less frequently is the homophily perspective, which attempts to understand the likelihood of research collaborations based on the similarity of collaborators’ preferences and attributes. In addition, compared to studies focused on the fields of the natural and exact sciences, engineering, and the health sciences, research collaborations in the social sciences have been underexamined in the literature, despite the growing numbers of social scientists who engage in such collaborations. This study assessed homophily with respect to geographical, ascribed, acquired and career-related attributes in co-authorships in the social sciences, based on a co-authorship matrix of 913 higher education researchers. The findings showed that geographic and institutional attributes were by far the most powerful homophilic drivers of collaborations, suggesting the importance of physical proximity, national incentives, and shared culture, language, and identity. Another driver was the similarity of acquired attributes, particularly certain preferences regarding research agendas; these absorbed the residual explanatory power that ascribed attributes such as gender or age had in co-authorship preferences. The study is novel in its analysis of the extent to which similarities in the research agendas of researchers predicted co-authorship. The findings indicate the need for further co-authorship homophily analyses around a broader set of acquired attributes and the trajectories that lead to them.

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Notes

  1. Co-authorship of a scientific publication is a visible form of research collaboration, but does not represent the entire spectrum of research collaborations (Laudel, 2002). This spectrum is broad and involves diverse forms of collaboration, including informal and casual contributions to the research process. Co-authorship is usually based on the authors who contributed the most to a research study, but in some cases it may include honorary and ghost co-authors (Kumar, 2018). The order of authors is supposed to identify those who contributed the most to the research process, but it is often contextual to disciplinary and sub-disciplinary fields (Marusic et al., 2011). Specifically, some contributors making similar contributions to a research project can be co-authors in some disciplinary and sub-disciplinary fields, but not in others (Whetstone & Moulaison-Sandy, 2020).

  2. The Boolean search string used was as follows: “(SRCTITLE (“higher education”) OR SRCTITLE (“tertiary education”)) AND DOCTYPE (ar) AND PUBYEAR > 2003 AND PUBYEAR < 2015.” This step yielded 40 journals related to higher education, two of which were excluded: “Chronicle of Higher Education” because of characteristics that distinguish its articles from other journals (see Horta, 2017) and “Art Design Communication In Higher Education,” because the journal published only two articles during the period of interest.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the HKU Seed Fund for Basic Research for New Staff for new faculty (SF). This study was also partially funded by the Research Grants Council (Hong Kong) through a project entitled ‘Characterizing researchers’ research agenda-setting: An international perspective across fields of knowledge’ (project number: 27608516).

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  1. Social Contexts and Policies of Education, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Hugo Horta

  2. Human Communication, Development and Information Sciences, Faculty of Hong Kong, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Shihui Feng

  3. Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-Iscte), Iscte—Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    João M. Santos

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Horta, H., Feng, S. & Santos, J.M. Homophily in higher education research: a perspective based on co-authorships. Scientometrics 127, 523–543 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04227-z

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