1 research outputs found
Twenty Years of Network Science: A Bibliographic and Co-Authorship Network Analysis
Two decades ago three pioneering papers turned the attention to complex
networks and initiated a new era of research, establishing an interdisciplinary
field called network science. Namely, these highly-cited seminal papers were
written by Watts&Strogatz, Barab\'asi&Albert, and Girvan&Newman on small-world
networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex
networks, respectively. In the past 20 years - due to the multidisciplinary
nature of the field - a diverse but not divided network science community has
emerged. In this paper, we investigate how this community has evolved over time
with respect to speed, diversity and interdisciplinary nature as seen through
the growing co-authorship network of network scientists (here the notion refers
to a scholar with at least one paper citing at least one of the three
aforementioned milestone papers). After providing a bibliographic analysis of
31,763 network science papers, we construct the co-authorship network of 56,646
network scientists and we analyze its topology and dynamics. We shed light on
the collaboration patterns of the last 20 years of network science by
investigating numerous structural properties of the co-authorship network and
by using enhanced data visualization techniques. We also identify the most
central authors, the largest communities, investigate the spatiotemporal
changes, and compare the properties of the network to scientometric indicators.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1908.0847