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The structure of scientific collaboration networks
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Newman, M. E. J.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2001-01-09
- Volume
- 98
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 404-409
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2125315567
- Cited by
- 4,482
- References
- 4
- FWCI
- 47.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
