Co-authorship network comparison across research fields using motifs

Sarvenaz Choobdar, Pedro Ribeiro, Sylwia Bugla and Fernando Silva

2012

Abstract

Comparing scientific production across different research fields is commonly controversial and subject to disagreement. Different fields have different practices, but expectedly some fields such as Chemistry and Physics should be more comparable then they are to Mathematics or Computer Science. Such comparison is often based on quantitative indicators, such as papers per researcher, but data normalization is rather difficult to accomplish. Here, we focus on the comparison of different fields based on their research collaboration networks. Could it be that co-authorship patterns can characterize and differentiate various fields of research? We use co-authorship networks where nodes are researchers and the edges show the existing co-authorship relations between them. Our comparison methodology is based on network motifs fingerprints, that are over represented patterns or subgraphs in the network. We derive motif fingerprints for 22 research fields based on 29 motifs of size three to five found in the corresponding co-authorship networks. These fingerprints provide a quantitative measure for assessing similarity among research fields, and our analysis shows that the discrimination power of 29 motif types is not identical. We use a co-authorship dataset built from over 15,361 publications inducing a co-authorship network with over 32,842 researchers.

Keywords

Network Comparison; Network Motif; Motif Profile; Co-authorship Network; Collaboration Pattern

Reference (text)

Sarvenaz Choobdar, Pedro Ribeiro, Sylwia Bugla and Fernando Silva. Co-authorship network comparison across research fields using motifs. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), pp. 147-152, IEEE, Istanbul, Turkey, August, 2012.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{ribeiro-ASONAM2012,
  author = {Sarvenaz Choobdar and  Pedro Ribeiro and  Sylwia Bugla and Fernando Silva},
  title = {Co-authorship network comparison across research fields using motifs},
  doi = {10.1109/ASONAM.2012.34},
  booktitle = {IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining},
  pages = {147-152},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  month = {August},
  year = {2012}
}