School of Politics and Public Administration, Qingdao U., China
Innovative scholars not only find themselves deeply connected within social networks of collaborations, but also within acknowledgment networks that rely on the relationship between authors and acknowledgees. This paper studies the bidirectional relationship between acknowledgement and collaboration networks. Based on the bibliographic data collected from the new energy vehicles industry over the period of 2008 to 2020, it tests the reciprocal causation between them. The empirical results confirm that a scholar’s position in the acknowledgement network will affect his / her position in the future collaboration network, and vice versa. To sum up, it addresses the research void by investigating the reciprocal correlation between acknowledgement and collaboration networks. In particular, this paper proposes a novel approach for constructing the acknowledgement network using data mining techniques, which is more efficient than existing methods.
