2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Identifying graduate students and early career faculty with strong potential for research productivity and funding success is a growing priority in institutional research. Bibliometric approaches, the study of trends in publication topics and co-authors, offer new ways to quantify the collaborative and topical breadth of scholars’ early publishing activity.

Following researchers in team science, we hypothesize that centers for institutional research are likely to draw or select for scholars with more open, interdisciplinary, and multi-topic networks of coauthors. Using recent cohorts of Innovation Fellows’ (IF) scholars who have completed an entrepreneurial and industry-focused mentoring program, we compared network graph heuristics IF scholars and their peers in the same environments. This paper describes a normalized composite measure of network openness and closedness derived from co-author graphs as an early indicator of academic career trajectory. To operationalize network openness, we introduce a composite heuristic based on established graph-theory measures: low Burt’s constraint, high participation coefficients, and high entropy of collaborator communities. We demonstrate that these structural properties, which may be observable within the first five years of publishing, can be correlated with distinct developmental trajectories across academic appointment types. Existing literature shows that over time, it is natural for scholars to develop denser networks as their social capital grows, but much more difficult to expand in topic focus or collaborator networks.

We identify three canonical structures: (1) ‘Cohesive Cores,’ dense graphs with few clusters and high total link strength, typical of early-career researchers embedded in disciplinary labs or advisor-led teams; (2) ‘Bridges,’ semi-open networks marked by multiple moderately connected clusters, characteristic of faculty cultivating cross-unit collaborations or work within interdisciplinary Research Institutes; and (3) ‘Exploratory Constellations,’ open networks with diffuse ties and low density, often associated with interdisciplinary or translational research agendas.

Comparative analyses between institute scholars and tenure-track, professional, research-track faculty show differential value in each configuration: closed networks accelerate productivity and reputation within disciplinary domains critical for tenure, while open networks enable diversified funding, cross-institutional visibility, and adaptability crucial for non-tenure professional advancement. The proposed normalized openness index functions as a useful analytic for evaluating collaborative diversification, offering administrators and research professionals a predictive metric for mentoring and resource allocation in data-driven faculty evaluation systems.