The CRI co-author network
To what extent do scientists at Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) collaborate? Using the Thompson Reuters Web of Science, I have constructed the CRI co-author network for 2008. As best I can determine, the Web of Science database contains 1271 papers from 2008 with CRI authors. In total, 4496 authors contributed to this set of papers — not all these authors are from CRIs of course, but they have all co-authored a paper with someone from a CRI. The network is shown on the left: the green dots are authors, with blue links between pairs of authors indicating co-authorship on at least one paper.
What surprises me is the extent of the largest set of authors that can be connected to each other by co-authorship. This largest connected component can be seen sitting in the centre of the 2008 network diagram, containing 2325 of the of the 4496 authors (52%). It contains authors from many of the CRIs (including me and a number of my colleagues at IRL) and from a number of Universities, both in New Zealand (including many from the the MacDiarmid Institute) and overseas. The next largest connected component contains only 31 authors.
If you look at the size of the largest connected component in the CRI co-author networks each year, 2008 is the largest. Just after the CRIs were established, in 1994, the largest component contained only 195 authors, occupying only 12% of the network. One reason for the growth of the largest component is that since 1994, the average number of co-authors each author has in a given year has risen from two to five. In other words, CRI scientists are collaborating more extensively in 2008 than they were in 1994.
0 Responses to “The CRI co-author network”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ken Perrott, Sciblogs NZ. Sciblogs NZ said: The CRI co-author network: To what extent do scientists at Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) collaborate? Using t.. http://bit.ly/4mBVDP […]
Very interesting depiction. I would wonder how the main cluster segregates by CRI. It would also be interesting to do the same analysis for NZ universities, and conjecture how any differences relates to research style.
Daniel – both great ideas. The university network is in the pipeline, but due to lack of foresight I didn’t pull the addresses off Web of Science after I ran the queries. At the moment I can pick out people I know but can’t say anything quantitative about whether particular CRIs dominate the giant component for example.
Oh, and do the cluster sizes scale?
[…] an earÂlier post I looked at the 2008 CRI co-author netÂwork. Now let’s turn to the UniÂverÂsity netÂwork. […]
[…] changed over the last 20 years. I also want to follow up with more detail on the surprisingly large co-author networks that exist within the New Zealand science […]
[…] a blog post last year, I constructed the co-author networks for the New Zealand CRIs using the same database. What I […]
[…] so how do scientists make any progress at all? As I have seen from my studies, they collaborate more, work in bigger teams and become more specialised. Some of the tools scientists use, such as […]
Hi Shaun,
I’m just curious about the software you used for the graphs.
Many thanks.
Hi Spock, it was a while ago, but for this I think I used Network Workbench, which reads ISI Web of Science records.
I see, thanks for the swift reply Shaun.
Do you use any other network visualization software, if you do not mind asking.
We also use the python package, NetworkX in conjunction with matplotlib.
Thanks again Shaun. Cheers.
Spock
-Live long and prosper-