On six degrees of separation in DBLP-DB and more

Abstract

An extensive bibliometric study on the db community using the collaboration network constructed from DBLP data is presented. Among many, we have found that (1) the average distance of all db scholars in the network has been stabilized to about 6 for the last 15 years, coinciding with the so-called six degrees of separation phenomenon; (2) In sync with Lotka's law on the frequency of publications, the db community also shows that a few number of scholars publish a large number of papers, while the majority of authors publish a small number of papers (i.e., following the power-law with exponent about -2); and (3) with the increasing demand to publish more, scholars collaborate more often than before (i.e., 3.93 collaborators per scholar and with steadily increasing clustering coefficients).