Scientific collaboration and career stages: An ego-centric perspective

•Studies scientific collaboration and academic career by ego-centric networks.•Detects individual career development by analyzing scientist's relative role.•Diverse relative role growth types are found during career stages.•Collaborators have an influence on the formation of relative role growth types. In scientific research collaboration, researchers collaborate with different scholars throughout their career stages. Researchers at different career stages may play various roles in science teams. This paper focuses only on the researchers’ roles in their respective science teams, defined as “relative roles” here, rather than comparing roles among researchers. As the academic age of researchers is increasing, researchers formulate the positive (e.g., junior-peer-senior) or negative growth trajectories (e.g., peer-peer-junior) of the relative roles throughout their career stages, which are defined as the “relative role growth patterns”. Further, these growth patterns can be divided into different “relative role growth types” according to their several common characteristics. By constructing ego-centric networks of researchers based on academic age, this paper investigates the changing relative roles of researchers at different career stages and relative role growth types summarized from multiple growth patterns, and then analyzes the collaborative ability (i.e., collaboration frequencies and number of collaborators) and research performance under different growth types. In addition, we also discuss the influence of collaborators on the formation of relative role growth types. We find 13 relative role growth patterns and summarize them into four growth types. The four growth types have diverse collaborative ability and research performance. Different collaborators have different effects on the formation of growth types of researchers. Collaborators who have high productivity and high citations per paper have a positive influence on researchers’ growth and vice versa. This study could be useful for researchers planning career development, also for policymakers and university administrators.