Advances in Network Clustering and Blockmodeling

13Scientific Co-Authorship Networks

Marjan Cugmas¹, Anuška Ferligoj^1,2, and Luka Kronegger¹

¹FDV, University of Ljubljana

²NRU HSE, Moscow

13.1 Introduction

Network studies of science offer researchers great insights into the dynamics of how knowledge is created and the social structure of scientific society. The flow of ideas and the scientific community's overall cognitive structure is observed through citations among scientific contributions, usually manifested as patents or papers published in scientific journals. The social structure of this society consists of relationships among scientists and their collaborations. De Haan [9] suggests six operationalized indicators of collaborative relations between scientists: co-authorship, shared editorship of publications, shared supervision of PhD projects, writing a research proposal together, participation in formal research programs, and shared organization of scientific conferences.

Due to the accessibility and ease of acquiring data through bibliographic databases, most scientific collaboration analyses are performed with co-authorship data, which play a particularly important role in research into the collaborative social structure of science. Co-authorship networks are personal networks in which the vertices represent authors, and two authors are connected by a tie if they co-authored one or more publications. These ties are necessarily symmetric. The study of community structures through scientific co-authorship is especially ...