An evolutionary analysis of collaboration networks in scientometrics

Abstract

The research area of scientometrics began during the second half of the nineteenth century. After decades of growth, the international field of scientometrics has become increasingly mature. This study intends to understand the evolution of the collaboration network in the field of scientometrics. The growth of the discipline is divided into three stages: the first period (1987–1996), the second period (1997–2006), and the third period (2007–2015). Macro-level, meso-level, and micro-level network measures across the time periods are compared. Macro-level analyses show that the degree distribution of the collaboration in each time span are consistent with power-law, and that both the average degree and average distance steadily increase with time. From the meso-level perspective, the increase of the number of clusters in the collaboration networks suggests the emergence of more collaborative fields in scientometrics. Moreover, the growth of the size of primary clusters demonstrates the expansion of the research fields and the collaboration range. Micro-level structure analyses identify the authors/researchers with high performance in raw degree measure, degree centrality measure, and betweenness measure, all of which are dynamic across different time spans. From three dimensions (raw degree, degree centrality, and betweenness centrality), the collaboration dominators are identified for each time span.