Author Cooperation Network in Biology and Chemistry Literature during 2014–2018: Construction and Structural Characteristics

How to explore the interaction between an individual researcher and others in scientific research, find out the degree of association among individual researchers, and evaluate the contribution of researchers to the whole according to the mechanism and law of interaction, is of great significance to grasp the overall trend of the field. Scholars mostly use bibliometrics to solve these problems and analyze the citation and cooperation among academic achievements from the dimension of “quantity”. However, there is still no mature method for scholars to explore the evolution of knowledge and the relationship between authors; this paper tries to fill this gap. We narrow down the scope of research and focus the research content on the literature in biology and chemistry, collect all the papers from PubMed system (a very comprehensive authoritative database of biomedical papers) during 2014–2018, and take year as a specific analysis unit so as to improve the accuracy of the analysis. Then, we construct the author cooperation networks. Finally, through the above methods and steps, we identify the core authors of each year, analyze the recent cooperative relationships among authors, and predict some changes in the cooperative relationship among the authors based on the networks’ analytical data, evaluating and estimating the role that authors play in the overall field. Therefore, we expect that the cooperative authorship networks supported by the complex network theory can better explain the author’s cooperative relationship