Newman, PNAS, 2001.

Citation

M.E.J.Newman. 2001. The Structure of Scientific Collaboration Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 404-409.

Online Version

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/2/404.full.pdf+html

Databases

MEDLINE (biomedical research)[1]

Los Alamos e-Print Archive (physics)[2]

NCSTRL (computer science)[3]

Summary

This is a paper investigating the structure of scientific collaboration. The author ulitized data from a number of databases in different fields: Biomedical, Physics and Computer Science. Properties of these networks are:

• In all cases, scientific communities seem to constitute a ‘‘small world,’’[4] in which the average distance between scientists via a line of intermediate collaborators varies logarithmically with the size of the relevant community.

• Those networks are highly clustered, meaning that two scientists are much more likely to have collaborated if they have a third common collaborator than are two scientists chosen at random from the community.

• Distributions of both the number of collaborators of scientists and the numbers of papers are well fit by power-law forms with an exponential cutoff. This cutoff may be caused by the finite time window (1995-1999) used in the study.

• There are a number of significant statistical differences between different scientific communities. Some of these are

obvious.