Studying Group Dynamics through Social Networks Analysis in a Medical Community

Abstract

In 2008, the Brazilian Department of Science and Technology created the INCTs (Brazilian Science and Technology Institutes). One of them was the Cancer Control INCT. Due to its importance and considering that there are different groups working together in the same area, it is important that they collaborate intensely. Envisioning an empowerment of scientific collaboration, the BRINCA project was created to support a set of analyses of the social networks from this particular INCT. These analyses were created by mining curricular and publications bases, and identifying different types of scientific relationships and areas. We were able to observe, for instance, how the interaction is amongst researchers from related areas, which researchers were more collaborative and which ones were isolated from the network. These analyzes were used by the INCT coordination to understand and act to improve scientific collaboration.

Colaborações científicas em Zika: identificação dos principais grupos e pesquisadores através da análise de redes sociais

“…Albuquerque et al 11 analyzed scientific collaboration between Brazilian researchers that participated in the National Institute of Science and Technology for Cancer Control (INCTCC). The authors conducted social network analysis using a multidimensional model, also analyzing the time series of publications by the group members based on information retrieved from the Lattes and PubMed platforms.…”

“…As important as analyzing researchers' output is to analyze their engagement in the scientific community, their role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and the ways that groups in a given field of science evolve 11,12 . In particular, metrics from Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be used to explore the relationships in networks of scientific collaboration, also known as Scientific Social Networks (SSN) 11,13 . In studies focused on co-authorship, this relationship can be measured as the proportion with which the same groups of authors publish articles in common, where such publications can be used to measure the strength of links between researchers.…”