| dc.description.abstract | The impact of research work is related to a scholar’s reputation and future promotions. Greater research impact not only inspires scholars to continue their research, but it also increases the possibility of a larger research budget from sponsors. Given the importance of research impact, this study proposes that utilizing social capital from peers, typically defined as resources embedded in a social structure, is an effective way to achieve better research impact. In reality, some scholars appear often in the highly rated journals. Besides their eminent contributions to research, this clue implies that these scholars might benefit from their social capital or social relationships, which in turn leads to better research outcomes and favorable consideration for publication in top-ranked journals. However, the extant literature rarely looks into the issue of social capital and its research impact. The contribution of this study is to define six roles (information center, core position, broker, socialite, explorer, and veteran) in the network based on three dimensions of social capital theory, and investigate how these roles interact and affect citations on publications. A total of 72 Information Systems scholars from the Social Science Citation Index database were collected to test the hypothesized associations. The results show that the roles of information center and broker receive more resources from colleagues in the network. Both roles can improve their research by taking advantages of receiving more resources, and thereby receive higher citations in publications. In addition, expanding relationships with outstanding colleagues (i.e., socialite) helps researchers develop all facets of structural capital. Moreover, if researchers collaborate with different scholars (i.e., explorer), it will help them shift to the structural positions of core position and broker. Finally, researchers with long publishing tenure (i.e., veterans) will contribute to the development of the information center in the network.
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