Benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ scientific research collaboration network

Scientific research collaboration networks are well-established research topics, which can be divided into two kinds of research paradigms: (1) The topological features of the whole scientific collaboration networks and the collaboration representations in some given fields. (2) The individual nodes’ characteristics in the collaboration networks and their endorsements in the networks. However, in the above studies, all the nodes’ roles in the scientific collaboration network are the same, all of whom are called collaborators, thus the relationships among all the nodes in the scientific collaboration network are symmetric, and the scientific collaboration network is undirected. Such symmetric roles and relationships in the undirected networks have no incentive effects on the members’ participations and efforts in the team’s scientific research. In this paper, the roles of team members in the scientific research collaborations are defined, including the scientific research pioneers and contributors, their collaboration relationships are considered from the viewpoint of principal-agent theory, and then the directed scientific collaboration network is built. Then the benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ networked scientific research collaborations is presented, which will encourage the team members with different roles to make their efforts in their scientific research collaborations and improve the quality of scientific research outputs. An example is used to test the above ideas and conclude that the individual member’s real outputs not only lie in his/her real scientific research efforts, but also rest with his/her contributions to other members’ scientific research.