Want To Succeed in Academia? Build a Network Beyond Your Co-Authors

Science is an extremely collaborative process. Scholars work together in formal contexts — forming teams to design experiments, test theories, and write up findings as co-authors on papers — and informally, as mentors, critics, sounding boards, and friends. As a whole, these connections are vital to a scholar’s academic success. But is one type of collaboration more crucial than the other?

To uncover this, a team of researchers led by Lluís Danús, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND), and Sandra González-Bailón, co-director of CIND and Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed 129,750 political science journal articles by around 86,000 authors from 2003 to 2023. The team, which also includes University of Pennsylvania Political Science Professor Guy Grossman, looked at the formal connections between authors (co-authorship) and their informal connections, using the acknowledgments appended to the publications. 

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), revealed that informal ties create a larger and denser network of support than co-authorship ties and are a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations. The disconnection from informal networks is associated with lower academic productivity and publication impact even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige.

“Academic performance relies on a special type of social capital known as the 'invisible college,' the informal networks of scholars who exchange ideas, collaborate, and influence the direction of knowledge,” says first author Lluís Danús. “Research has mostly analyzed co-authorship structures as a way to track these relationships, but we found that looking at the ‘thank you’ notes in the acknowledgment section of published articles provides additional insight: these informal networks are larger, less hierarchical, and show a stronger association with scholarly impact than co-authorship ties."

For the study, the research team built two longitudinal networks: one mapping co-authorship connections and the other mapping the acknowledgment ties. They used these networks to measure centrality in formal and informal support structures — and to identify disconnected scholars.

The researchers collected additional information on each scholar’s gender, seniority, the prestige of the institution they are affiliated with, geographical region, and methodological orientation. They also compiled three measures of publication success: the number of articles published; the h-index, and the Euclid citation scores, all measures of productivity and impact. 

The researchers found that embeddedness in informal networks of academic exchange (those captured by the acknowledgment ties) is a key predictor of publication impact.

They also found that opportunities are unevenly distributed in how research communities self-organize. “Institutional stratification within academia is common,” González-Bailón says. “Your workplace strongly shapes opportunities, resources, and outcomes. What we uncover in this research is a more subtle manifestation of unequal opportunity. Informal collaborations allow scholars to draw advice and feedback from a broader range of colleagues. Our findings suggest that these informal networks of support create opportunities for valuable exchange but can also create disparities that may affect academic careers. After all, it takes a village to produce research with impact.”

“Informal Connections Outweigh Co-authorship Ties in Academic Impact” was authored by Lluís Danús (first author), Sandra González-Bailón (senior author), Carolina Torreblanca (Penn Development Research Initiative DevLab), Will Dinneen (Penn Development Research Initiative DevLab), and Guy Grossman, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations.