What 5,000 Acknowledgements Tell Us About Informal Collaboration in Financial Economics

In: Research Policy, Vol. 50, Issue 6, 2021, 104236

Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Discussion Paper No. 11

45 Pages Posted: 30 Dec 2015 Last revised: 8 Apr 2021

See all articles by Michael E. Rose

Michael E. Rose

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition

Co-Pierre Georg

EDHEC Business School

Date Written: April 07, 2021

Abstract

Formal collaboration between researchers via co-authorship has been shown to have a positive impact on academic productivity. But most academic collaboration is informal, e.g. in the form of commentary on research papers. We present and discuss a novel dataset on informal collaboration in Financial Economics obtained from the acknowledgement sections of over 5,000 published research papers. We construct the social network of informal collaboration connecting authors and commenters and show that a researcher’s position in this network is predictive of her future productivity and the scholarly impact of the papers she comments on. We study the characteristics of the network using various measures from network theory and characterize what determines a researcher’s position in it.

Keywords: financial economics, intellectual collaboration, social networks, acknowledgements

JEL Classification: A14, D83, G00

Suggested Citation

Rose, Michael and Georg, Co-Pierre, What 5,000 Acknowledgements Tell Us About Informal Collaboration in Financial Economics (April 07, 2021). In: Research Policy, Vol. 50, Issue 6, 2021, 104236, Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Discussion Paper No. 11, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2709107 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2709107

Michael Rose

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition ( email )

Marstallplatz 1
Munich, Bayern 80539
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://https://www.ip.mpg.de/en/persons/rose-michael.html

Co-Pierre Georg (Contact Author)

EDHEC Business School ( email )

58 rue du Port
Lille, 59046
France

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