Co-authorship network structure analysis

Abstract

Abstract The analysis of networks of collaboration between scientists reveals features of academic communities that help in understanding the specifics of collaborative scientific work and identifying the notable researchers. In these networks, the set of nodes consists of authors and there exists a link between two authors if they have coauthored one or more papers. This article presents an analysis of the co-authorship network based on bibliometric data retrieved from the distributed economic database. Here we use the simple network model without taking into account the strength of collaborative ties. The data were analyzed using statistical techniques in order to get such parameters as the number of papers per author, the number of authors per paper, the average number of coauthors per author and collaboration indices. We show that the largest component occupies near 90 % of the network and the node degree distribution follows a power-law. The study of typical distances between nodes and the degree of clustering makes it possible to classify the network as a ‘small world’ network.