Understanding success through the diversity of collaborators and the milestone of career

Scientific collaboration is vital to many fields, and it is common to see scholars seek out experienced researchers or experts in a domain with whom they can share knowledge, experience, and resources. To explore the diversity of research collaborations, this article performs a temporal analysis on the scientific careers of researchers in the field of computer science. Specifically, we analyze collaborators using 2 indicators: the research topic diversity, measured by the Author†Conference†Topic model and cosine, and the impact diversity, measured by the normalized standard deviation of h†indices. We find that the collaborators of high†impact researchers tend to study diverse research topics and have diverse h†indices. Moreover, by setting PhD graduation as an important milestone in researchers' careers, we examine several indicators related to scientific collaboration and their effects on a career. The results show that collaborating with authoritative authors plays an important role prior to a researcher's PhD graduation, but working with non†authoritative authors carries more weight after PhD graduation.