We explore hierarchies in knowledge production by analysing the extent to which institutions in the global South receive research funding, vis-à-vis their counterparts – and collaborators – in the global North. We use ESRC data on grants, excluding fellowships, from between 2015 and 2020, to create a dataset of collaborations that receive funding.

A social network analysis or SNA approach allows us to assess which institutions have more influence, based on their capacity to collaborate internationally. A core assumption of SNA is that that social ties matter because they influence behaviour or transmit information and resources. As such, using SNA allows to enhance our understanding of phenomena that emerge from the interaction of individuals or institutions, particularly outcomes that depend on 'social capital' or, more generally, on the form and quality of collaboration between actors.

Global South collaborations.

Unsurprisingly, we find a core-periphery structure in ESRC-funded projects involving international collaboration, with funding centred on elite UK universities and Global South partners in peripheral positions. But interestingly we find some Global South institutions in intermediary positions between the core and the periphery. We also find distinct clusters of partners generally each centred on an elite UK university but with distinctive Global South nationalities and distinctive project themes. The study adds depth to our understanding of international hierarchies of knowledge production.

Scientific collaboration has been recognized as an important relationship that facilitates the sharing of expertise and knowledge, significantly contributing to research advancement and innovation. Consequently, national and international policies promote such partnerships across various sectors and institutions. In this work, we investigate how co-citation, keywords co-occurrence, and co-authorship networks influence each other within three Italian Academic Communities (IAC): sociologists, statisticians, and Management scholars from 2012 to 2022. We collect data from the Italian Ministry of Education and Scopus and apply the Relational Hyperevent Model (RHEM) to analyze the collaboration networks of the IAC over time. Additionally, we introduce a new hyperedge covariate, the geometrically-weighted subset repetition (GWSR), as a smoothed version of the formerly defined subset repetition to capture the persistence of groups in a more parsimonious model. The analysis illustrates the complexities of scientific collaboration and differences in collaboration strategies among IAC.

Gender inequalities within academia are widespread. Women publish less, are less likely to hold prominent author positions, and their contributions are overlooked compared to men. In the Netherlands, women are increasingly represented at the doctorate level. But while women are as likely as men to start an academic publishing career after obtaining a doctorate, their publishing careers are shorter. This in part explains why women remain underrepresented in the professoriate.

To shed more light on the impact of gender in publishing careers of scholars, in this paper, we will investigate the role of gender in collaboration networks among political scientists and sociologists in the Netherlands (N>500). Do scholars prefer to work (i.e. co-publish) within same-sex collaboration teams? To what extent does previous track record (e.g. citation scores) and seniority influence decisions who to work with and is this impact conditional on the gender of the potential collaboration partners?

To answer these and other questions we collected the names and positions of faculty members for all political science and sociology departments in the Netherlands in the period 2021-2025. We enriched these web-scraped data with information on faculty member's gender, ethnicity, seniority, publishing careers, online presence, etc.

We constructed complete, longitudinal collaboration networks (consisting of over 50.000 ties) and tested our hypotheses with RSiena.

Global North-South disparities persist in science, yet our understanding of the mechanisms sustaining them remain limited. Focusing on North-South research partnerships, this study examines how the division of labor within medical research teams contributes to these disparities. We harvested article metadata from PLOS ONE alongside CRediT contributorship data, and then applied a new TF-IDF-based method to account for variation in the prevalence and distribution of contributor roles across authors. In linear probability models, adjusting for authors’ prior publication output and impact, gender, scientific age, medical specialization and TF-IDF adjusted contributor roles, we find that GS researchers are more likely to assume first authorships but have substantially lower representation in last and corresponding authorships compared to their GN team-mates. Subgroup analyses reveal that this regional disadvantage is most pronounced for researchers from Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, while those from East and South Asia are underrepresented in all lead-authorship roles, including also first authorships. This pattern also holds across national income levels, with clear disparities observed between researchers from lower- and higher-income countries. We also find that while leadership roles generally increase the likelihood of assuming first-, last- or corresponding authorships, GS scientists with such roles remain less likely to obtain last authorships. These findings expose a consistent misalignment between contributions and authorship positions in North-South collaborations and highlight the need for experimental research to clarify the causal pathways through which these imbalances arise.

Network methods have played a central role in the study of think tanks and policy expertise. Political scientists have examined think tanks to explore elite cliques engaged in ideological projects within specific political parties, while sociologists have focused on how these organisations leverage cross-professional networks to frame and stabilise political-economic problems through ideologically palatable policy solutions. However, little is known about the intellectual life within the broader think tank community or how these organisations interact with one another. Existing research tends to take a metaphorical approach to think tank networks, often neglecting formal qualitative and quantitative network analysis.

This paper addresses these gaps by analysing British think tank citation networks to: (1) map the intellectual networks that generate ideas and evidence in British public policy; (2) assess community cohesiveness; and (3) identify intellectual authorities shared across the broader think tank community and within specific cliques. This also presents a novel approach to studying how knowledge regimes—the institutional arrangements that shape the production and use of policy expertise—are structured. By applying this methodological framework, the paper offers new insights into how think tanks are organised, how they interconnect, and what forms of knowledge are considered authoritative within the British knowledge regime