Network effects and research collaborations: evidence from IMF Working Paper co-authorship

An important trend in knowledge generation and diffusion is that the co-authorship of research publications has become remarkably more frequent. In this paper we study the role of co-authorship networks for starting and maintaining research collaborations. Relying on the network of the IMF’s Working Papers—which reflects well the endogenous nature of research collaborations—we document the presence of many authors with few direct co-authors, yet indirectly connected through short co-authorship chains. Two researchers are more likely to team up if their distance in the existing network is shorter, arguably reflecting reduced matching frictions. In addition, productive authors and authors with different co-author network sizes collaborate more, because of synergies between senior and junior researchers. Being employed in the same department and having citizenship of the same region also influence the decision to collaborate. We argue that incentives should be directed to researcher pairs that are initially more distant from each other in the co-authorship network.