Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The structure of scientific collaboration networks
✓ Free legal copy found
Preprint, hosted by Cornell University (arxiv.org)
This is the authors’ own version from before peer review, so it may differ from the published paper.
Read the free PDF →Other free copies
Abstract
The structure of scientific collaboration networks is investigated. Two scientists are considered connected if they have authored a paper together and explicit networks of such connections are constructed by using data drawn from a number of databases, including MEDLINE (biomedical research), the Los Alamos e-Print Archive (physics), and NCSTRL (computer science). I show that these collaboration networks form "small worlds," in which randomly chosen pairs of scientists are typically separated by only a short path of intermediate acquaintances. I further give results for mean and distribution of numbers of collaborators of authors, demonstrate the presence of clustering in the networks, and highlight a number of apparent differences in the patterns of collaboration between the fields studied.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.98.2.404 · Publisher: National Academy of Sciences