Many researchers are seeking strategies to become salient in the eyes of others and join the club of elite scientists. Some groups are disadvantaged in this race despite their efforts. Comparing to natural sciences the structure of the coauthorship network in social sciences is less stable and collaborations are smaller and last shorter, which makes it harder to become a part of the disciplinary core. Our contribution intends to add new empirical evidence about the impact of collaborations on recognition among peers and research productivity in sociology. In our research we would like is to compare the publication strategies of the researchers occupying important positions in terms of the collaboration network and named as highly estimable scholars. We hope that our research can enlighten our understanding of whether chosen publication strategies affect your position in the community.

As the benefits of a knowledge-based economy become increasingly apparent around the world, so too does the prominence of inequality in knowledge production. One notable form of this inequality is the categorical difference between publications produced in the Global North versus those in the Global South. Universities as one of the main knowledge infrastructures and their identity being under crisis especially for those in the periphery trying to break into international markets driving isomorphic advantage. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach to observe the discrepancy between image and identity by comparing university publication outputs between international and national bibliometric databases, with a focus on the representation of different disciplines. This approach highlights pockets of innovation in the natural sciences, as well as the lack of integration into international knowledge production for the social sciences and humanities, which are common characteristics for universities in the periphery.