Coauthorship and subauthorship patterns in financial economics

Acknowledgments are a special kind of intellectual partnership. Acknowledged scientists in published papers are called subauthors. We examine collaboration patterns between authors and subauthors in four finance journals from 1994 to 2013: the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. We employ social network analysis and discover that the majority of subauthors form a compact giant component with small average distances between the nodes. Moreover, the subauthorship network in finance has a non-overlapping structure, exhibiting low clustering coefficients and a plethora of cohesive groups of nodes.