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On interdisciplinary collaborations in scientific coauthorship networks: the case of the Brazilian community

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Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaborations have recently drawn the attention of scholars, since bridging academic relationships contributes to make scientific coauthorship networks stronger. However, previous studies have focused on characterizing specific groups rather than on studying a complete and robust scientific community. In this article, instead of analyzing particular scenarios, we characterize these collaborations with respect to the Brazilian scientific communities defined according to the upper level of a knowledge area classification scheme. For this, we collected data from the Lattes Platform, an internationally renowned initiative from CNPq, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, that provides a repository of Brazilian researchers’ curricula vitae and research groups, all integrated into a single system. Our results show that the Brazilian coauthorship network grew and became especially interdisciplinary, with 35.2% of all collaborations being interdisciplinary and 57.6% of the researchers having participated in at least one interdisciplinary collaboration. We also investigate the intensity of these interdisciplinary collaborations across distinct communities. Finally, we explore a temporal view of the researchers’ career, thus identifying distinct collaboration patterns involving the aforementioned scientific communities.

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Notes

  1. Lattes Platform: http://lattes.cnpq.br.

  2. This classification scheme is organized into four levels (see http://bit.ly/1JM2j1k for its full version in Portuguese): major area (e.g., Exact and Earth Sciences), area (e.g., Computer Science), subarea (e.g., Theory of Computation) and specialty (e.g., Formal Languages and Automata). For more details, refer to de Siqueira et al. (2020).

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Scientific_Information.

  4. https://www.keckfutures.org.

  5. Interdisciplinary publications are those that have at least two coauthors from distinct major areas.

  6. Maximal subgraph that includes a path connecting each pair of nodes of a network.

  7. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Brazil.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Projects MASWeb (FAPEMIG/PRONEX APQ-01400-14) and Science Tree (FAPEMIG/PRONEX APQ-02302-17), and by the authors’ individual research grants from CNPq and CAPES. Particularly, the first author thanks the Federal University of Viçosa for the leave granted for professional formation. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Rio Paranaíba, MG, 38810-000, Brazil

    Geraldo J. Pessoa Junior

  2. Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica, Divinópolis, MG, 35503-822, Brazil

    Thiago M. R. Dias

  3. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, 31270-901, Brazil

    Thiago H. P. Silva & Alberto H. F. Laender

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  1. Geraldo J. Pessoa Junior
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  2. Thiago M. R. Dias
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  3. Thiago H. P. Silva
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  4. Alberto H. F. Laender
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Correspondence to Alberto H. F. Laender.

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Pessoa Junior, G.J., Dias, T.M.R., Silva, T.H.P. et al. On interdisciplinary collaborations in scientific coauthorship networks: the case of the Brazilian community. Scientometrics 124, 2341–2360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03605-3

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