  Collaboration is a key driver of science and innovation. Mainly motivated by
the need to leverage different capacities and expertise to solve a scientific
problem, collaboration is also an excellent source of information about the
future behavior of scholars. In particular, it allows us to infer the
likelihood that scientists choose future research directions via the
intertwined mechanisms of selection and social influence. Here we thoroughly
investigate the interplay between collaboration and topic switches. We find
that the probability for a scholar to start working on a new topic increases
with the number of previous collaborators, with a pattern showing that the
effects of individual collaborators are not independent. The higher the
productivity and the impact of authors, the more likely their coworkers will
start working on new topics. The average number of coauthors per paper is also
inversely related to the topic switch probability, suggesting a dilution of
this effect as the number of collaborators increases.
