Recently, I've been thinking about my research collaborations -- who I work with, who I publish with - and how they have changed over time. I find this topic interesting because collaboration networks can illustrate how one interacts with colleagues. Does one publish with a lot of people with a few people ('specialist' publication behavior) , infrequently with a lot of people ('ominivory'), or a bit of both ('opportunistic') ? Similarly, collaboration networks may be helpful in identifying ways to strengthen or adjust one's research profile by publishing more with particular collaborators or finding new collaborators that are well connected in research areas of interest. In this post, I will discuss my own collaboration network and discuss possible ways that I can extract information from them to guide my future research. The figures that I made for this post were produced using code similar to that here (incidentally, my first git repo) . Intuitively, I am aware that my collaboration network has expanded considerably since finishing my graduate studies. In other words, I have transitioned from publishing as a 'specialist' towards 'omnivory'. As a graduate student I worked with a small group of people (mostly in the US and Panama), as I was very focused on a couple of research topics during this time (Figure 1). During my current postdoc, I have published with people in my supervisor's laboratory as well as with a number of larger, more international working groups. The publications from these working groups particularly have widened my collaborations considerably (Figure 2). As these collaborations are more recent, however, my connections with these collaborators are more shallow (i.e. weaker links) because I have not published as extensively with them as I have with my collaborators during my graduate studies.
Looking into the future, I think it will be important for me to strengthen my collaborations with my new colleagues, as I would like to be an expert in some areas and not a jack-of-all-trades (this might work for trees, but may be less ideal for ecologists*). Finding the right balance between omnivory and specialization is tricky. In my case, for example, I'm more of a specialist in terms of research areas than in areas of technical expertise. Therefore, it would be helpful for my future research to maintain strong collaborations with collaborations that are more proficient in techniques, such as phylogenetics or spatial graph theory. One of concerns that I have with my research collaborations is gender balance; although I have not run the analysis for this, I would guess that my collaboration network is strongly male dominated. I am strongly in favor of promoting diversity in science**, but need to work on actively integrating more diversity into my group of collaborators to ensure that my future collaboration network reflects a broader, more inclusive vision of STEM. * I can't find the link for this article, but there was an article published a few years ago showing the trade-offs associated with publishing in a large or small range of journals in terms of the h-indices of the researchers. If I recall correctly, the take-home message was that researchers with higher h-indices were neither publishing omnivores or specialists. **Resources such as DiversifyEEB may help to improve gender or racial under-representation in conferences and workshops, which may also improve imbalances in author lists. |