Figure 5
From: Scientific success from the perspective of the strength of weak ties
The role of tie configuration on scientific success of researchers and publications. (a) The mean h-index of scientists characterized by a given average asymmetric tie strength \(\langle v_i\rangle \), Eq. (4). (b) The average number of citations obtained by papers created in teams with a given average asymmetric tie strength. The decreasing nature of both empirical relationships (a, b) clearly indicates that scientific collaboration based on weak ties is more appreciated in terms of the number of citations. Moreover, since the number of citations is often correlated with the quality of research, the above results also show that weak ties usually result in more creative (in terms of knowledge production) scientific collaborations.
