Zhu, Haiyi, Robert E. Kraut, and Aniket Kittur. "The impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2014.

This study investigates how membership overlap among online communities affects their survival, using historical data from 5673 Wikia communities. The findings indicate that higher levels of membership overlap correlate with increased survival rates. Particularly, young communities benefit from having members who are centrally involved in other, more mature communities. The research contributes both theoretically, by highlighting a key mechanism for online community success, and practically, by offering insights for community creators and tool designers on managing membership for better community sustainability.