  Studies on social networks highlight the importance of network structure or
structural properties of a given network and its impact on performance outcome.
One of the important properties of this network structure is referred as
"social capital" which is the "network of contacts" and the associated values
attached to these networks of contacts. In this study, our aim is to provide
empirical evidence of the influence of social capital and performance within
the context of academic collaboration. We suggest that the collaborative
process involves social capital embedded within relationships and network
structures among direct co-authors. Thus, we examine whether scholars' social
capital is associated with their citation-based performance, using
co-authorship and citation data. In order to test and validate our proposed
hypotheses, we extract publication records from Scopus having "information
science" in their title or keywords or abstracts during 2001 and 2010. To
overcome the limitations of traditional social network metrics for measuring
the influence of scholars' social capital within their co-authorship network,
we extend the traditional social network metrics by proposing a new measure
(Power-Diversity Index). We then use Spearman's correlation rank test to
examine the association between scholars' social capital measures and their
citation-based performance. Results suggest that research performance of
authors is positively correlated with their social capital measures. This study
highlights that the Power-diversity Index, which is introduced as a new hybrid
centrality measure, serves as an indicator of power and influence of an
individual's ability to control communication and information.
