Network of collaboration among PC members of Brazilian computer science conferences

Abstract

The structure, dynamics, and importance of the social network of collaboration among scientists has been already studied, sometimes yielding counter-intuitive conclusions. In this paper we investigate the role played by people who served as PC (Program Committee) members in the network formed by members of the Brazilian computer science community and their co-authors. Some characteristics of such network are compared with those reported in similar studies involving other scientific collaboration networks. As a result, we show that apart from the evidence of Milgram's phenomenon (six degrees of separation), there is no other community with completely similar patterns (among those used for comparison). This is probably due to the unique characteristics of the target network. For instance, their members do not necessarily interact with each other in terms of co-authorship since they belong to different subareas of computer science. There are strong evidences that the clusters in this network are connected by non-Brazilian members. Moreover, nodes with high degrees have little connection to Brazilian authors.

Brazilian bibliometric coauthorship networks

“…One problem generally encountered in bibliometric studies focused on the measurement of scientific collaboration is the collection of data related to a sufficiently large number of researchers comprising a social network (Bazzan & Argenta, ). On the other hand, the complexity of correctly processing and analyzing data extracted from scientific publications is a computational challenge because such data sets are commonly as large as millions of records and dozens of gigabytes.…”

“…This growth is reflected in the amount of publication by the Brazilian academic community (de Meis, Velloso, Lannes, Carmo, & de Meis, ; Glänzel, Leta, & Thijs, ; Leta & Chaimovich, ). Although some studies have been performed to evaluate, analyze, and document the scientific production of small‐ and medium‐sized Brazilian groups belonging to specific domains, namely, computer science (Bazzan & Argenta, ; Laender, de Lucena, Maldonado, de Souza e Silva, & Ziviani, ), education (Coutinho et al., ), agriculture (Velho & Krige, ), and health and biological sciences (Zorzetto et al., ), little is known about the research interactions among all Brazilian researchers. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies to date attempting to identify or reveal the overall bibliometric relationships of major knowledge areas from all Brazilian researchers (macrolevel analysis) because of the difficulty in obtaining academic data, such as scholarly publications, and the complexity of processing data from massive lists of publications.…”

The collaboration network of the Brazilian Symposium on Databases

“…4 A similar case of the "friend of my friend is also my friend" phenomenon found in social networks [28]. 5 The h-index [13] of an author is the highest number of her publications with at least that many citations, e.g., an author with 10 papers with at least 10 citations each has h-index of 10. 6 Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.br…”

“…Then, Newman [29] answers a broad variety of questions about collaboration patterns, presenting several structural and topological features from bibliographic databases in biology, physics, and mathematics. Likewise, other studies build and analyze academic networks by countries [16,24], universities [7,16,21], researchers [3,19], subareas [18,19], and venues [2,5,22,26,31,32].…”

Visualization of the Scholarly Output on Evidence Based Librarianship: A Social Network Analysis

“…Coauthorship networks are a kind of social network which are constructed by connecting two or more authors together if they have coauthored at-least one article. This method has been utilized in a number of fields, such as library and information science (LIS) (Erfanmanesh & Hosseini, 2015;Hu, Hu, Gao, & Zhang, 2011;Larivière, Sugimoto & Cronin, 2012;Liu, Bollen, Nelson, & Van de Sompel, 2005;Shu, Larivière, Mongeon, Julien, & Piper, 2016;Yan, Ding, & Zhu, 2010), scientometrics (Erfanmanesh, Rohani, & Abrizah, 2012), medicine (Gonzalez-Alcaide, Park, Huamaní, Gascón, & Ramos, 2012), general practitioner research (Hong et al, 2016), cardiology (Yu, Shao, & Duan, 2013) and computer science and information systems (Bazzan & Argenta, 2011;Takeda, 2010). The aforementioned researchers have pointed out the functionality and importance of co-authorship networks in the field of complex networks.…”