Co-Authorship and Bibliographic Coupling Network Effects on Citations

<div><p>This paper analyzes the effects of the co-authorship and bibliographic coupling networks on the citations received by scientific articles. It expands prior research that limited its focus on the position of co-authors and incorporates the effects of the use of knowledge sources within articles: references. By creating a network on the basis of shared references, we propose a way to understand whether an article bridges among extant strands of literature and infer the size of its research community and its embeddedness. Thus, we map onto the article – our unit of analysis – the metrics of authors' position in the co-authorship network and of the use of knowledge on which the scientific article is grounded. Specifically, we adopt centrality measures – <i>degree</i>, <i>betweenneess</i>, and <i>closeness centrality</i> – in the co-authorship network and <i>degree</i>, <i>betweenness centrality</i> and <i>clustering coefficient</i> in the bibliographic coupling and show their influence on the citations received in first two years after the year of publication. Findings show that authors' <i>degree</i> positively impacts citations. Also <i>closeness centrality</i> has a positive effect manifested only when the giant component is relevant. Author's <i>betweenness centrality</i> has instead a negative effect that persists until the giant component - largest component of the network in which all nodes can be linked by a path - is relevant. Moreover, articles that draw on fragmented strands of literature tend to be cited more, whereas the size of the scientific research community and the embeddedness of the article in a cohesive cluster of literature have no effect.</p>