Ageing of edges in collaboration networks and its effect on author rankings

Abstract

In this paper we show that assigning weights to the edges in a collaboration network of authors, according to a decreasing exponential function depending on the time elapsed since the publication of a common paper, may add valuable information to the process of ranking authors based on importance. The main idea is that a recent collaboration represents a stronger tie between the co-authors than an older one and, therefore, reduces the weight of potential citations between the co-authors. We test this approach, on a well-known data set and with an established methodology of using PageRank-based ranking techniques and reference sets of awarded authors and demonstrate that edge ageing may improve the ranking of authors.