ABSTRACT

Organizational projects often cross physical, functional, and geo-political boundaries. This is true for educational as well as commercial organizations. In the area of academic research, projects that lead to publishable articles are often the joint product of workers in different locations, organizations, or countries. The research described below proposes a methodology for measuring the level of that collaboration.

The standard method for measuring the “value” of a researcher is to sum the total number of articles they have published in peer-reviewed journals (Im et al., 1998a; Im at al., 1998b, Athey and Plotnicki, 2000). The resulting total can be normalized to consider the number of authors per paper and the number of pages per article. The research described in this document proposes the use of “degrees-of-separation” (DOS) as another dimension, which places an emphasis on collaboration, along which we might measure the value of a researcher.

From graph theory, one DOS value for a graph node is calculated as the number of steps in the shortest path from that node to another node. The average DOS value for one node is then the average of its DOS values to all other nodes. The graph node with the smallest average DOS value is the node that is, on average, “most closely connected” to the rest of the nodes. In another domain, one website (Tjaden, 1996) uses software to calculate the DOS value between any actor/actress and the actor Kevin Bacon, using performers as nodes and movies as edges. When applied to academic research, an author can be considered a node, connected to other nodes through co-authored articles. The experiment described in this article uses DOS to compare previously judged highly productive MIS researchers along this new dimension, in an attempt to ascertain which are the most collaborative workers.

Presented at and published in the Conference Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, Big Island, Hawaii, January 7-10, 2002.