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Prior studies showed that scientists’ professional networks contribute to research productivity, but little work has examined what factors predict the formation of professional networks. This study sought to 1) examine what factors predict the formation of international ties between faculty and graduate students and 2) identify how these international ties would affect publication productivity in three East Asian countries. Face-to-face surveys and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of faculty and doctoral students in life sciences at 10 research institutions in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. Our final sample consisted of 290 respondents (84 faculty and 206 doctoral students) and 1,435 network members. We used egocentric social network analysis to examine the structure of international ties and how they relate to research productivity. Our findings suggest that overseas graduate training can be a key factor in graduate students’ development of international ties in these countries. Those with a higher proportion of international ties in their professional networks were likely to have published more papers and written more manuscripts. For faculty, international ties did not affect the number of manuscripts written or of papers published, but did correlate with an increase in publishing in top journals. The networks we examined were identified by asking study participants with whom they discuss their research. Because the relationships may not appear in explicit co-authorship networks, these networks were not officially recorded elsewhere. This study sheds light on the relationships of these invisible support networks to researcher productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research is often thought of as being conducted by individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex and integrated system of people, papers, and ideas. Studies of co-authorship and citation networks have revealed important structural properties of researchers and articles, but currently the structure of scientific ideas themselves is not well understood. In this study, we posit that topic networks may be a useful framework for revealing the nature of conceptual relationships. Using this framework, we map the landscape of interconnected research topics covered in the multidisciplinary journal PNAS since 2000, constructing networks in which nodes represent topics of study and edges give the extent to which topics occur in the same papers. The network displays small-world architecture, characterized by regions of dense local connectivity with sparse connectivity between them. In this network, dense local connectivity additionally gives rise to distinct clusters of related topics. Yet notably, these clusters tend not to align with assigned article classifications, and instead contain topics from various disciplines. Using a temporal graph, we find that small-worldness has increased over time, suggesting growing efficiency and integration of ideas. Finally, we define two measures of interdisciplinarity, one of which is found to be positively associated with PNAS’s impact factor. Broadly, this work suggests that complex and dynamic patterns of knowledge emerge from scientific research, and that structures reflecting intellectual integration may be beneficial for obtaining scientific insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]