The Social Structure of the Information Systems Collaboration Network: Centers of Influence and Antecedents of Tie Formation

In this study, we examine the historical information systems research collaboration network. We build the network using coauthorship information in the Senior Scholars' basket of eight journals from the publication of MISQ's first issue in April, 1977, to November, 2015. The different journals vary widely in their network configurations. We examine the influence of gender homophily, geographic homophily, and field tenure heterophily on coauthorship in the network. From using exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) on a randomly selected subset of the network, we present preliminary evidence that suggests that ties in the IS collaboration network exhibit homophily according to gender and geography. Conversely, coauthorship seems to exhibit heterophily along the temporal dimension: short-tenured researchers in the field prefer to collaborate with long-tenured researchers. ERGM enables one to make statistical inferences concerning the influence of node attributes and structural variables on network formation, which is hard to do with logistical regression because network relationships violate the independence of observations assumption. We also reveal the current center of the IS collaboration network. Based on this center, we propose a metric to measure a researcher's connectedness in the network.