Measuring scientific collaboration in co-authorship networks

Abstract

Scientific research is currently considered one of the key factors in the development of our life. It plays a significant role in managing our business, study, and work more conveniently. One of the important aspects when it comes to scientific research is the level of collaboration among researchers/disciplines. The collaboration between two different disciplines contributes to obtaining more reliable solutions for our everyday issues. Therefore, it is needed to understand the collaboration patterns among researchers and come up with convenient strategies for strengthening this kind of collaboration. In this work, we aim at investigating the patterns of scientific collaboration among researchers across disciplines. To this end, we generate a co-authorship network for several disciplines. The generated network reveals many interesting facts regarding the collaboration patterns among researchers who work in the same/different disciplines. We involve several measurements in this study that evaluate different aspects, which is of interest to the research communities since most of the studies in the literature measure specific aspects. Moreover, we propose a novel metric for measuring scientific collaboration in a research community and use it to benchmark the collaboration among disciplines. Finally, we use the obtained results/facts in providing recommendations for scientific communities.