![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Altogether, it seems that conferences help academics to find and sustain productive collaborations that are otherwise difficult to find and sustain: collaborations outside their existing institution or clique. In particular, we observe that occurring conferences reduce ‘clustering’ (the tendency for one's direct contacts to also be direct contacts of each other) within the relevant co-authorship networks. ![]() Our evidence points to the first of these explanations. In principle, this premium may be driven either by academics finding more suitable co-authors in academic meetings, or by already nascent collaborations benefiting from the face-to-face interaction afforded by the conference. Pairs of collaborators that are not collocated are the ones that benefit most from conferences, in terms of improving their ranking of publication. Of collaborations manifested as journal publications, those that were among academics scheduled to attend the cancelled meeting appeared, on average, in journals ranked five places lower than those that were among academics that attended a conference that actually took place. We also find that collaborations forged between the attendants of occurring conferences lead to better publication outcomes. (Moreover, in online Appendix A, we provide evidence that there were no systematic changes in attendants’ characteristics across ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ conferences in the year of the cancellation.) Our findings are robust to several econometric specifications and sample classifications. In our regressions, we include controls for individual fixed effects and several covariates to control for individuals’ time-varying productivity and propensity to collaborate. We find that the 2012 APSA meeting cancellation led to a 16% decrease in individuals’ likelihood of co-authoring an output with another conference participant, and moreover that it was specifically the likelihood of collaborating with an academic affiliated to a different institution that fell. We matched these data sets to co-authored working papers and published articles to infer the occurrence of a collaboration. This sample is representative of research active academics in the field of political science, accounting for 22% of published authors during the period. To conduct this analysis, we assembled new data sets including 17,467 academics (attendants of the relevant meetings) and around 86 million dyads of participants. We run standard difference-in-difference regressions, examining the likelihood of collaboration among participants in the APSA conference in the 2009–12 editions and using as a ‘control’ the chance of collaboration among participants attending a comparator conference (the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting). Our main hypothesis is that the cancellation decreased individuals’ chances of collaborating with another conference participant. The APSA meeting gathers around 3,000 presenters every year, and by the time of its cancellation in 2012 the conference programme had been arranged and published. From these estimates, we draw inferences about the specific role of conferences in the formation of new scientific work, and also, more generally, about the role of network constraints in causing inefficient biases in co-author matchings. By exploiting a ‘natural experiment’ – the last-minute cancellation, due to ‘Hurricane Isaac’, of the 2012 American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting – we are able to estimate the number and character of the collaborations that ‘went missing’. In this article, we measure the extent to which academic conferences facilitate collaborations generally, and productive collaborations particularly. And yet, there is also strong evidence, provided in Freeman and Huang ( 2015), that some of the most productive scientific collaborations arise the least readily. Co-authors bring, to a project, a wider pool of ideas and of specialist expertise, and scientific productivity therefore depends on co-authors becoming efficiently matched. An existing literature (Jones, 2009 Gans and Murray, 2014 Agrawal et al., 2016) has attributed this trend to the increasing challenges associated with pushing further outwards at the existing frontiers of knowledge, and of producing work generally at the standards required for success in an increasingly competitive academic environment. ( 2007) – is the increasing prevalence of collaborative endeavour. A phenomenon observed across all scientific disciplines – as noted for example by Wuchty et al. ![]()
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