Can LLMs Predict Academic Collaboration? Topology Heuristics vs. LLM-Based Link Prediction on Real Co-authorship Networks
arXiv:2604.01379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can large language models (LLMs) predict which researchers will collaborate? We study this question through link prediction on real-world co-authorship networks from OpenAlex (9.96M authors, 108.7M edges), evaluating whether LLMs can predict future scientific collaborations using only author profiles, without access to graph structure. Using Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct across three historical eras of AI research, we find that LLMs and topology heuristics capture distinct signals and are strongest in complementary settings. On new-edge prediction under […]