N is for Network: New Tools for Mapping Organizational Change
Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, Ph.D., Director, Murray Center for Women in Technology,
New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark1
Anatoliy Gruzd, Ph.D., School of Information Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Regina Collins, MS candidate, Professional and Technical Communication, NJIT
Babajide Osatuyi, Ph.D. candidate, Information Systems, NJIT
Keywords: faculty, retention, networks, social network analysis
Abstract: Understanding network dynamics is important for underrepresented minorities and women in
technological organizations, who can easily spend their entire careers on the periphery, far away from
the flow of information at the core. We explore this problem by describing the results of a new study of
faculty research networks conducted by the NSF-funded ADVANCE program at the New Jersey Institute
of Technology (NJIT). Using tools such as ORA to analyze a database that contains nearly a decade of
information about NJIT faculty publications, ADVANCE researchers have created dynamic co-authorship
maps that provide an aerial view of the organizational landscape as it changes over time. By giving
faculty and administrators guided access to such maps, university change agents can promote mentoring
policies and practices that support the advancement of women and minority faculty.
To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected, write Christakis and
Fowler in their 2009 book on the power of social networks (xiii). This observation is true of
organizations as well as individuals. Universities and corporations are not merely buildings and
balance sheets; they are relational entities webs of interaction and perception whose complex
structure is largely invisible to the people embedded in them (O Reilly 1991). Organizational
networks are transformational engines (Ibarra, Kilduff, and Tsai 2005). They supply the social
capital that powers career success, allowing young professionals to convert their human capital
into status. Network structure drives institutional change as well, facilitating (or retarding)
innovation maintaining (or altering) norms, including norms of gender and race.
Understanding network dynamics is especially important for underrepresented minorities and
women in technological organizations, who can easily spend their entire careers on the
periphery, far away from the flow of information at the core. As Christakis and Fowler note,
Network inequality creates and reinforces inequality of opportunity (301).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) implicitly adopted a network perspective when in
2001 it created the ADVANCE Program as successor to the Professional Opportunities For
Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program, shifting its focus from individual
empowerment to institutional transformation. As Virginia Valian (1998) and other theorists
remind us, such transformation requires more than a linear add-women-and-stir approach
(Etzkowitz, Kemelgor & Uzzi 2000). It requires a three-dimensional understanding of
organizational structure. In 2006, NJIT ADVANCE began a three-year proof-of-concept project
designed to acquire such understanding and use it to create positional advantages for NJIT
women faculty researchers, diminishing their potential isolation and increasing their access to
novel information. In this paper, we provide an overview of our methodology and discuss the
implications of the data we have acquired.
1
Contact: Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, 323 King Boulevard, Newark, NJ 07102 or
steffen@njit.edu
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Strategies: In formulating our original NSF proposal, we observed that the absence of
women faculty in science and technology creates a negative feedback loop that resists change
because few women want to go to places where few women are. This aversion is sensible since
gender schema bias increases as the proportion of women in a given population decreases
(Valian 1998). Women scientists frequently respond to such bias (the chilly climate) by creating
a small, empowering environment in their own labs (Rosser 2004). Such micro-climates foster
support, as do many of the women-to-women mentoring initiatives developed by Women in
Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) and ADVANCE programs across the country. In
network terms, however, same-sex ties (homophily) do not always work as well for female
scientists and engineers as they do for their male counterparts. In organizations where men have
long been dominant, there are strong incentives for men to seek instrumental ties to other men
because men generally have greater status and access to resources than their female counterparts
(Ibarra 1992, McPherson 2001). This status advantage is attributable to gender schema bias the
male competency bonus (Valian 1998) and to the ongoing self-replication of male networks
typified by a rich-get-richer phenomenon in which more male homophily makes more male
homophily. In contrast, women are often forced to divide their energies and divide their
psyches as well seeking support ties to other women but pursuing heterophilous ties to high
status, well-connected men in order to realize their instrumental goals. Moreover, female desire
for heterophilous ties may not be reciprocated. If network contacts are chosen according to
similarity and/or status considerations, [women] are less desirable choices for men on both
accounts (Ibarra 1992). In other words, the network strategies women adopt tend to be more
costly and less effective than the strategies men adopt.
Hypotheses: Over the last three years, ADVANCE has studied patterns of gender
homophily in NJIT faculty research networks even as we have worked to diminish homophily
and to provide incentives for research collaboration among women and men from different
disciplines. In designing our study, we made a number of assumptions about the status of NJIT
women faculty, based on our reading of literature in the field and on quantitative and qualitative
research we had conducted previously for the 2005 NJIT Status of Women Faculty Report. In
particular, we posited that NJIT women faculty members are more isolated than their male peers,
less likely to be in the information loop, and less likely to be tied to high-status, well-connected
colleagues. Being out of the loop makes it harder for women to accumulate social capital which,
in turn, has a devastating effect on retention and advancement, we observed, especially in the
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines where collaborative
research projects and multi-authored papers are the norm. Isolation limits women s opportunities
to reality-check their expectations. It limits access to tacit knowledge. It blocks the flow of news
about hot research areas and funding opportunities, access to unpublished research, invitations to
join grant initiatives, support for intellectual exploration and risk-taking, guidance that
demystifies opaque promotion and tenure processes, and, not least, brokered connection to the
high status people. In short, it cuts women off from all the assets that flow to male peers through
their social networks (Steffen-Fluhr 2006). We theorized that NJIT male faculty members are
less likely to collaborate with female faculty than with their male colleagues and that this
collegial asymmetry is likely to result in reduced productivity for the women, as measured by
number of publications. In general, we hypothesized that increased collaboration is positively
associated with career success, as measured by acquisition of tenure and promotion up the
ranks especially cosmopolitan collaboration across disciplines.
2
Methodology: As in medicine, where treatment is sometimes begun even before the lab
results have arrived to confirm the diagnosis, in 2006 NJIT ADVANCE initiated programs
designed to stimulate interdisciplinary cross-gender research collaboration even before we had
verified our hypothesis that collaboration is positively correlated with career advancement for
women. This decision was fortunate, since it proved extremely difficult to collect the faculty
network data required for our study. In year one of our project, we concentrated primarily on
self-reported data gleaned from a friends and colleagues survey instrument initially administered
in one-on-one interviews and in small groups. We also developed a sense of community survey
that measured departmental climate and campus-level climate on an 11-point scale.
Unfortunately, when we fielded the network survey online, we decided to combine it with the
climate survey, creating an instrument that was too long for the attention spans of many of our
male faculty. Nearly 80% of the women faculty completed the social network survey, and we
had additional data from our pre-test sample; however, less than 20% of male faculty did so.
Because our self-reported data were too small and too skewed to be useful for network analysis,
we subsequently focused on collecting objective bibliometric data, hypothesizing that co-
authorship linkages were a valid proxy for NJIT faculty network ties.
From 2006 through 2009, ADVANCE researchers designed, built, populated, and
validated an interactive database of NJIT faculty publications using semi-automated affiliation
searches to mine Scopus and other repositories for which the NJIT library has licenses. The
database now contains 2208 author names and 7225 publications. Some of these publications go
back decades, but we have concentrated on achieving a high-degree of accuracy for the period
2000-2008 because it gives us before and after snapshots we can use to gauge the impact of
ADVANCE interventions. A user-friendly interface in the database allows faculty members to
access and update their entries and to generate simple ego-maps of their research networks via
HyperGraph. ADVANCE administrators can also use the database to generate co-author lists and
answer basic statistical queries, disaggregating data by gender, department, and tenure status.
Though a satisfying achievement after so much labor and frustration, the successful
construction of the database was always a means to an end. It gave ADVANCE researchers the
ability to map the connections (and disconnections) among NJIT female and male faculty and
analyze the significance of those network patterns for promotion and tenure. We began by
defining the population we proposed to study. Of the 2000+ authors in our database, we chose
463 tenured/tenured-track STEM faculty members who had been employed full-time for all or
part of the period 2000-2008. (We also included a small group on non-tenure-track Research
Professors who are supported on soft money.) We approached the data in two somewhat
different ways: 1) we performed statistical analyses on the whole-network data, testing various
hypotheses about gender, collaboration, and advancement; and 2) we did case studies of selected
male and female faculty ego-network maps, comparing and contrasting individual patterns of
collaboration and career advancement as they developed over the nine-year period.
Hypothesis Testing: The more paths that connect you to other people in your network,
the more susceptible you are to what flows within it (102), Christakis and Fowler observe. If
you are at the center of a network, you are likely to have many more direct and indirect
connections to other people than if you were at the periphery. Consequently, you can earn a
centrality premium if good things& are flowing through the network. More people are willing to
act altruistically toward you than toward those at the margins (Christakis and Fowler, 299). In
academic networks, the good thing that flows through the network is information including
information about status and reputation. If women faculty members are less centrally located
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than male faculty, they will incur greater information-foraging costs and have fewer
opportunities to signal their value as organizational players, a difference that may constitute a
structural constraint for advancement (Burt 1998). The authors of the 2009 National Academy of
Sciences (NAS) report Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science,
Engineering and Mathematics Faculty express concern about this possibility when they observe
that women faculty members in the NAS study were less likely to engage in conversation with
their colleagues on a wide range of professional topics, including research. This distance may
prevent women from accessing important information and may make them feel less included and
more marginalized in their professional lives. The report concludes by calling for future
research that will give us a deeper understanding of why female faculty, compared to their male
counterparts, appear to continue to experience some sense of isolation. The NJIT ADVANCE
network study responds directly to the NAS call, demonstrating that social network analysis
(SNA) methods can be used effectively and efficiently by gender and technology researchers to
measure relative network isolation and its impact on women s careers.
To explore the relationship between network structure, collaboration, and career
advancement, we tested a set of hypotheses using three SNA tools to analyze co-authorship data:
1) UCINET, a relatively inexpensive software program (developed by analysts Steve Borgatti,
Martin Everret, and Lin Freeman and marketed by Analytic Technologies) that is used to
measure various forms of network centrality and to perform statistical analyses; 2) ORA
(Organizational Risk Analyzer), a powerful and relatively user-friendly freeware package
developed at Carnegie Mellon; and 3) PNet, freeware for the simulation and estimation of
exponential random graph (p*) models, developed by a team of social network analysts at the
University of Melbourne. Embedded in UCINET is a freeware visualization tool called
NETDRAW. ORA may be used to generate sophisticated data maps as well.
Hypothesis 1. Women are more likely to be peripheral agents in the network,
thereby having a lower centrality (degree centrality, Eigenvector centrality, and
betweenness centrality) than their male peers. Centrality comes in a number of different
flavors, each of which constitutes a distinct network advantage. Degree centrality helps to
identify well-connected people who can directly reach many other people in the network. Being
well-connected means that a person has easier access to more sources of information and is
exposed to more novel ideas, all of which are important for academic advancement (Ibarra et
al.2005, Whittington and Smith-Doerr 2008; Gonzalez-Brambila,Veloso, and Krackhardt 2008).
However, having many connections does not always constitute power. A person can be central
within her group of close friends, but if nobody in that group is connected to a larger network,
then even the central person can find herself quite isolated. To account for such situations, we
relied on another measure called Eigenvector centrality. In addition to counting the number of
direct connections, this measure assigns higher weights to well-connected connections. In other
words, Eigenvector centrality looks for the importance of one s connections, not simply their
number. People with high Eigenvector centrality are able to reach other people in the network
quickly if the need arises. The third measure we used in our testing is betweenness centrality.
This measure reflects the extent to which a person has the ability to control information flow in
the network. In general, betweenness counts how many times a person functions as a missing
link between two people or groups who are not connected directly. Among other things, high
betweenness may indicate an interdisciplinary research agenda.
Centrality Results: For the period 2000-2008, the mean values for all three centrality
measures were consistently higher for male faculty than for female faculty. This suggests that
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male faculty tend to be more central in the network than female faculty. For the period 2000-
2005, the mean difference in Eigenvector values of 3.25 between male and female faculty at
NJIT was statistically significant based on t-test (p = 0.05). This confirms that, before NJIT
ADVANCE, female faculty members were less likely than their male peers to be connected to
well-connected individuals (the power players). In recent years, however i.e. after NJIT
ADVANCE began the Eigenvector centrality of women faculty has increased relative to their
male peers, an indicator that women are becoming more important players at NJIT.
Hypothesis 2. Male faculty are more likely to collaborate (co-author) with other
male faculty than with women faculty. As we indicated above, in historically male-dominant
environments (e.g. engineering schools!), our natural human tendency to seek ties with people
we perceive to be like ourselves (homophily) can have subtle but devastating effects on female
faculty advancement. Homophily drives network centrality in a loop. In this closed social space,
parity is not enough: a favorable network position does not create as much leverage for women
as it does for men (Ibarra 1992). Nor does a favorable position on the organization chart. Indeed,
women may need much higher Eigenvector values than their male peers in order to establish
baseline legitimacy (Burt, 1998). It is especially important for WEPAN and ADVANCE
programs to be aware of these issues as we design support structures for women faculty, lest we
inadvertently make a bad situation worse. In developing our own program initiatives, NJIT
ADVANCE has worked consistently and effectively to broker heterophilous ties among faculty
across disciplines and sectors, in the belief that minority groups especially benefit from
cosmopolitan networks (Ibarra et al. 2005, Rhoten and Pfirman 2007).
Method and Results: In order to establish a metric for changes in organizational
homophily, we used a statistical modeling approach. We counted the absolute number of ties
within and between male and female faculty groups. (All isolated nodes were removed from the
network prior to the analysis.) To interpret these numbers, we used Krackhardt and Stern s
(1988) E-I index which measures group embedding on a scale from -1 (all ties are within the
group) to +1 (all ties are with external members of the group). For our data, the E-I index was
equal to -0.64 suggesting that most of the ties in the network are between members of the same
group. To make sure that the results are not influenced by chance alone and/or by the large
number of male faculty in the data set, we also used the Joint-Count test (also known as
categorical autocorrelation) available in UCINET. The Joint-Count test measures the density of
ties within and between the two groups and then compares these values with values from
thousands of randomly generated networks with the same number of female and male faculty
members but without the assumption of homophily. Based on 10,000 random permutations, the
average number of cross-group ties that exists in a random network was 93.7. However, we
actually observed 71 cross-group ties in our network. The difference is 22.7 fewer cross-group
ties than what one would normally expect by chance alone, and this difference is statistically
significant based on this test (p = 0.03). This means that cross-gender ties are significantly less
likely to appear in our observed network than in a random network. Our initial hypothesis is thus
confirmed for the entire period under study. That is, from 2000 through 2008, male faculty
members were much less likely to collaborate with female faculty than with their male peers.
This finding seems to confirm the assumptions made in our original ADVANCE proposal and, in
combination with the results of hypothesis 1, begins to illustrate what the 2005 NJIT Status of
Women Faculty Report tactfully termed asymmetric collegial interaction.
Hypothesis 3. Network centrality predicts faculty retention better than number of
publications. Since network centrality and publication rate are different things, we decided to
5
test these measures separately in relation to retention. In terms of centrality, a person does not
necessarily have to publish a lot to be important. She can acquire a high centrality value merely
by co-authoring with well-connected individuals. Conversely, a person with a high number of
publications can still be isolated in our data (with centrality equal to 0), because he or she did not
co-author with any other faculty member at NJIT. To ensure accuracy, we thus began by
removing 69 potential outliers from the data. We normalized centrality measures and the number
of publications for each of the remaining 394 people by the number of years they were present in
our data set. We then separated the population by gender 335 men and 76 women and tested
each group separately using a t-test for network data available in UCINET. The results show that
for the men, publication rate was a significant indicator of their likelihood of leaving or staying
at NJIT (p = 0.03). That is, a male faculty who published more per year was more likely to stay
at NJIT than somebody who was less productive. However, for the women, Eigenvector
centrality seems to have been the leading indicator of retention. Specifically, the difference of
0.2 in means of the normalized Eigenvector centrality between women who stayed at NJIT
versus those who left was statistically significant (p = 0.02). In other words, a male faculty
member at NJIT is more likely to stay if he publishes a lot, but a female faculty member is more
likely to be retained if she is connected to well-connected colleagues. Surprisingly, the number
of publications was not a statistically significant factor for predicting retention for women.
Significance of Findings: The statistically significant correlation between network
centrality and female faculty retention discussed above is extremely important for organizations
such as WEPAN, NAMEPA, and ADVANCE since it means that we have now the ability to
picture (visualize) career landscapes in meaningful ways and the ability to predict, in real time,
who will advance in academia and who is in danger of dropping out. We can use this new
knowledge to create leverage for change in mentoring policy and practice. The 2009 NAS
Gender Differences report notes that, In every field, women were underrepresented among
candidates for tenure relative to the number of women assistant professors. The report calls for
future research that will illuminate the causes for the attrition of women& prior to tenure
decisions and urges universities to address the retention of women faculty in the early stages of
their academy careers. The work done by NJIT ADVANCE on network mapping and retention
responds to this call, creating a potential new best practice in the mentoring of junior faculty.
Network Centrality, Productivity, and Innovation: In a ground-breaking 2008 study,
Gonzalez-Brambila, Veloso, and Krackhardt examined the relationship between network
structure and academic productivity using a large faculty co-author database. They concluded
that faculty researchers publish more and publish higher quality work (as measured by citation
counts) when they have a high number of direct network ties (degree centrality), are part of a
sparse network, are central in the network (as measured by Eigenvector), and collaborate with
researchers in other disciplines. This study supports the work of Ibarra (1993, 2005) and others
who have long argued that there is a positive correlation between network centrality and
innovation. Research of this nature has guided NJIT ADVANCE in our efforts to function as an
institutional matchmaker, incentivizing the formation of interdisciplinary research ties among
men and women faculty. More recently, we have been able to use our co-author database to test
the validity of our assumptions about the beneficial effects of collaboration.
Hypothesis 4. During the period 2000-2008, NJIT faculty members who co-authored
more with other NJIT faculty members had a higher average per capita publication rate
than NJIT faculty members who co-authored less with other NJIT faculty members. This
hypothesis was confirmed, below, as was a similar hypothesis about the publication rates of NJIT
6
engineering faculty. Initially, we planned to test this hypothesis by measuring and comparing the
differences in the number of publications between the two faculty groups: those who co-authored
with other faculty members at NJIT and those who did not. However, we realized that using
binary criteria might well skew the results because faculty members who co-authored with just
one other person would be grouped with faculty who co-authored with many people.
Additionally, using binary criteria would make it difficult to test whether the number of
collaborators had any effect on productivity (the number of publications). To address these
concerns, we decided to use UCINET to conduct a regression analysis between the number of
collaborators (measured as normalized degree centrality) and the number of publications to
determine if there were any dependencies between these two variables.
The regression analysis found that there is a statistically significant, positive dependency
between the number of NJIT co-authors and the number of publications (regression coefficient =
0.83; p < 0.00).* Specifically, we found that 69% (R2=0.69) of the total variance in the number of
publications can be explained by variation in the number of co-authors. People who co-authored
more at NJIT were more productive than those who co-authored less. To establish that the
correlation between collaboration and publication rate held true across gender, we tested
Hypothesis 4 separately for male faculty and female faculty. In each case, the hypothesis was
confirmed. That is, for women, as for men, those who co-authored more published more. Even
more important for WEPAN goals is our recent research confirming that there is a positive
correlation between collaboration (network ties to co-authors) and increase in professorial rank.
For the assistant professors, this correlation implicitly measured retention. (See below.)
Hypothesis 5. During the period 2000-2008, NJIT assistant and associate professors
who co-authored more with other NJIT faculty members exhibited greater upward
movement in rank than assistant and associate professors who co-authored less with other
NJIT faculty. Based on t-tests for network data available in UCINET, the difference in means
between the two groups (those who were promoted in rank and those who were not) was
statistically significant (0.04; p < 0.00), as were the results when we ran the test again after
removing 23 members who left NJIT in the studied period. (Both tests were run using the default
of 10,000 random permutations.)
Women Faculty and Information Access - Case Studies: Because there are many other
variables involved, it is impossible to know for certain whether the positive network changes for
women faculty as a group described above (e.g., increased Eigenvector centrality) are the direct
result of the NJIT ADVANCE project. To get at a more subtle qualitative assessment data that is
sometimes obscured by statistical modeling, we did a series of case studies as well, comparing
changes in the ego networks of selected female ADVANCE participants and their male peers
from 2000-2008. To evaluate the correlation between network structure and faculty retention, we
paid special attention to the networks of faculty members who left the university during the study
period for reasons other than death or retirement. We illustrate this approach with several
examples below. These case studies are not only instructive per se; they also demonstrate the
revelatory power of data visualization (network maps).
Case A: Several women faculty who were actively involved in NJIT ADVANCE have
risen to leadership positions during the last three years. Changes in the structure of their
networks during this period correlate strongly with this advancement and, in a sense, predict it.
For example, the sequence of map snapshots below clearly illustrates the growth of one
emerging woman leader s co-authorship network and her increasing centrality in this network
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(see Figure 1). (In the network visualizations, link or line colors represent different years of co-
authorship.)
Figure 1. Changes in Eigenvector Centrality
The real power of this increased interconnectivity is even more apparent when we take the
network out to three degrees (a collaborator s collaborator s collaborator), the apparent outer
limit of network influence (Christakis and Fowler 2009). At three degrees, the network above
right looks like this:
Figure 2. Network Complexity at Three Degrees
Using ORA or other visualization tools, we can rearrange the same map to illustrate more clearly
the subject s relatively high Betweenness value (right) as demonstrated by the size of her node in
the network visualization (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Betweenness Centrality
Case B: Most women faculty involved in NJIT ADVANCE activities exhibited network growth,
but for some this increased connectivity may be fragile and temporary. As Christakis and Fowler
note, Loneliness is both a cause and a consequence of becoming disconnected (57). In the
following sequence, a faculty member who has long worked in relative isolation establishes
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increased connectivity through ADVANCE, but most of this network complexity comes from a
single new tie which, if severed, will lead once again to relative isolation.
Figure 4. Fragility of Increased Network Centrality
Case C: In our network study, the faculty members who have the highest Eigenvector centrality
values also tend to have the highest professorial rank (Distinguished Professor). This is one of
many indicators that encourage us to believe that our co-authors network is a good proxy for the
NJIT faculty status networks a hypothesis that we plan to test in future research. Evidence that
network centrality is positively correlated with career advancement comes from the other end of
the spectrum as well that is, from case studies of faculty members who have not advanced or
not been retained. The NJIT data we have collected fits all too well with the asymmetrical
tenure/retention data reported in the 2009 NAS national study in which the number of female
assistant professors coming up for tenure was far smaller than the number of male assistant
professors. For example, at NJIT during the period 2000 to 2008, 124 male tenured/tenure-track
faculty left the university s employ. The vast majority of these departures were senior faculty
who either died or retired. Only 23 (18.5%) of the 124 were assistant professors who left without
achieving tenure. During the same period, the numbers for the women tell a very different story.
Of the 14 women who were not retained, six (42.8%) were assistant professors who left without
achieving tenure. And another six (42.8%) were tenured professors who left because (to make a
series of long stories short) they were unhappy.
Here again, network patterns tend to have predictive power. For the women at least, there
is a strong correlation between being an isolate and leaving. This is not simply a question of
publish or perish. Many of these women published as much as their male peers. It is the
difference in network centrality that is salient. For example, compare the network structures in
Figure 5 below. The faculty members in question came to the university at the same time. Both
are prolific researchers who achieved tenure and senior rank. There is only one major difference:
the faculty member represented by the network on the left (a woman) is no longer at the
university.
Figure 5. Network Structure and Faculty Retention
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Implications of this Study for WEPAN and NAMEPA: Social scientists have long
recognized the power of SNA to provide thick descriptions of organizational behavior, the kind
of contextual knowledge that is a prerequisite for institutional transformation. In the past, it has
been difficult for change agents to harness this power to advance underrepresented faculty,
however, because collecting complete self-reported network data is problematic and laborious,
even for experts. Garton, Haythornthwaite, and Wellman (1997) report that "one heroic
researcher took a year to identify all the interactions in the networks of only two persons." As we
discovered in our own research, it is notoriously difficult to get adequate response rates to
surveys. Moreover, those who do respond are not necessarily always reliable (Dillman 1978.)
Advances in data-mining, combined with the increased involvement of academic researchers in
online social networks, offer a potential solution to this problem, allowing us to automate the
collection of both bibliometric data (who co-authors with whom) and sociometric data (who talks
to whom) and to map the former onto the latter (White, Wellman, and Nazer 2004; Gruzd
2009, 2010; Gruzd and Haythornthwaite 2010).
To canalize the power of SNA on behalf of women and minority faculty, however, we
need visualizations that will give us right-brained, immediate access to underlying network
structure pictures that will show what high Eigenvector centrality means, not merely give a
numerical value for it. To achieve this goal, we are developing a new network mapping tool that
will 1) give junior faculty access to the kind of satellite view of the organizational landscape that
is normally attributed to senior faculty boundary spanners a kind of GPS System for Career
Management; 2) allow academic administrators to identify problematic characteristics of the
units they manage; and 3) bring added value to the task of program assessment, allowing funding
agencies to more accurately measure the effectiveness of the interventions they support.
As we have begun to demonstrate, bibliometric data more and more easily accessible on a
national/global scale is a valid proxy for real-world faculty networks. Drawing on such data, in
the future ADVANCE, WEPAN, and NAMEPA will be able to offer university policy makers
new SNA tools to track changes in organizational health, to identify emerging leaders or isolated
backwaters, or to compare the relative advancement of selected groups/individuals. In
combination with traditional metrics such as the NSF 12, the ability to map changes in faculty
networks over time provides a powerful holistic method of seeing institutional transformation as
it unfolds.
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**
The significance level was calculated based on a permutation test of 10,000 random trials to avoid the
requirements of independence and random sampling that are not applicable to network data. In such calculations, it
is not uncommon to see p-values less than 0.00.
Of the 23 faculty members with the highest Eigenvector, 82% hold the rank of distinguished professor and 52% are
recent winners of NJIT research or master teacher awards.
12
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