School of Information Sciences

Torvik coauthors paper in PNAS on academic kinship

Vetle Torvik
Vetle Torvik, Associate Professor and PhD Program Director

Family relationships play a role in the business world, but what about academia? An international team of researchers, including Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik, has discovered that family background, or kinship, can influence academic careers just as it does in other sectors of society.

The researchers examined coauthorship surname patterns in five decades of health science literature worldwide. Using the PubMed database, with over twenty-one million papers, they identified country-specific trends over time and found that coauthors who are part of a kin tend to hold central positions in their collaborative networks. Torvik's contribution to the research was to conduct the geocoding and disambiguation of author names; without these enabling technologies, the analysis of such large-scale data would not have been possible.

The resulting paper, "Kin of coauthorship in five decades of health science literature," will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS; vol. 113 no. 30). In addition to Torvik, researchers included lead author Mattia Prosperi (Department of Epidemiology, University of Florida, Gainesville), Iain Buchan (Centre of Health Informatics, University of Manchester, U.K.), Iuri Fanti (Infectious Diseases Clinic, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome, Italy), Sandro Meloni (Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems and Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Zaragoza, Spain), and Pietro Palladino (Genomics, Genetics and Biology Innovation Pole, Italy).

In their conclusion, the researchers noted, "[A] certain level of kinship may have beneficial effects on the research outputs of a country, whereas greater or lesser amounts of kinship could have adverse effects....Just as kin build potent academic networks with their own resources, societies may do well to provide equivalent support for talented individuals with fewer resources, on the periphery of networks."

Torvik's current research addresses problems related to scientific discovery and collaboration using complex models and large-scale bibliographic databases. At the iSchool, he teaches courses on those topics as well as text and data mining, statistical modeling, informetrics, and information processing. He has built a suite of bibliographic data mining tools and datasets that are available from Abel.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers present at CSCW 2025

Several faculty, students, and recent grads will present their research at the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), which will be held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. The online portion of the conference will be held on October 10. 

Downie appointed executive associate dean

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Professor J. Stephen Downie has been appointed executive associate dean. In this role, he will work closely with Interim Dean Emily Knox to realize the iSchool's strategic goals and objectives. He also will provide leadership for the internal administration of the School, coordinate the work of associate deans and assigned staff, and facilitate faculty affairs.

Stephen Downie

Join the iSchool at the 2025 ALISE annual conference

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 6–8 in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme of the 2025 conference is "Decolonising Pedagogies: Agency, Identity, Practices."

AISLE awards to be presented to alumni, adjunct lecturer

Carolyn Kinsella (MSLIS '03), Beverly Frett (MSLIS '04), and Adjunct Lecturer Karen Egan have been selected to receive awards from the Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE). They will be honored at an awards banquet during the AISLE Annual Conference, which will be held from October 5–7 in Champaign, Illinois.

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top