Work Description

Title: Dataset for research on "Using egocentric analysis to investigate professional networks and productivity of graduate students and faculty in life sciences in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan" Open Access Deposited

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Attribute Value
Abstract
  • 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.
Methodology
  • This study was approved by the Institutional Review Boards in two institutions with which all researchers have affiliations. The informed consent form was presented to all participants, and written consent was received when participants agreed to respond to the survey and interview questions. Face-to-face surveys and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted among a sample of faculty and doctoral students in the life sciences at 10 research institutions in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. In each country, 30 faculty and 70 doctoral students were interviewed. Faculty and students were randomly drawn from list frames generated from departmental websites of the target institution. The survey questionnaire and interview included questions on research productivity, research projects, research involvement, research discussion network, and socio-demographic characteristics. Questions on the research discussion network employed an egocentric social network design in the form of a name generator with its attendant name interpreter. Each respondent (i.e., ego) could nominate up to 10 individuals (i.e., alters) with whom the ego discussed important matters about research. Our final sample included a total number of 290 respondents (84 faculty and 206 doctoral students; 100 respondents came from Japan, 90 from Singapore, and 100 from Taiwan) and 1,435 network members. For each interview session, respondents were interviewed in either their native language or English. Interviews were recorded and lasted about an hour on average.
Description
  • N/A
Creator
Depositor
Contact information
Keyword
Date coverage
  • 2009 to 2010
Citations to related material
  • Professional networks and productivity of East Asian graduate students and faculty in life sciences
Publisher
Resource type
Last modified
  • 09/21/2020
License
To Cite this Work:
Hara, N., Chen, H., Ynalvez, M. Dataset for research on "Using egocentric analysis to investigate professional networks and productivity of graduate students and faculty in life sciences in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan" [Data set]. Indiana University - DataCORE.

Relationships

Files (Count: 3; Size: 339 KB)

Thumbnail Title Original Upload Last Modified File Size Access Actions
ego-alter_data.csv 2020-09-21 2020-09-21 302 KB Open Access
ego_data.csv 2020-09-21 2020-09-21 26.8 KB Open Access
CSV_variables.xlsx 2020-09-21 2020-09-21 10.9 KB Open Access

Download All Files

All files in this dataset will be included in the zip download.
Files can be downloaded individually in the "Files" panel above.

Best for data sets < 3 GB. Downloads all files plus metadata into a zip file.