Acknowledgement Networks in Financial Economics

Acknowledged scientists are intellectual collaborators in published research; they are called subauthors. We explore subauthorship patterns in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Our sample spans the period from 1994 to 2013. Employing social network analysis, we find that the majority of subauthors form a compact giant component with small average distances between the nodes. Moreover, the subauthorship network in finance exhibits a non-overlapping structure, with low clustering coefficients and a large number of cohesive groups of nodes.