Collaboration in computer science: a network science approach. Part I (1010.4747v2)

Abstract: Co-authorship in publications within a discipline uncovers interesting properties of the analysed field. We represent collaboration in academic papers of computer science in terms of differently grained networks, including those sub-networks that emerge from conference and journal co-authorship only. We take advantage of the network science paraphernalia to take a picture of computer science collaboration including all papers published in the field since 1936. We investigate typical bibliometric properties like scientific productivity of authors and collaboration level in papers, as well as large-scale network properties like reachability and average separation distance among scholars, distribution of the number of scholar collaborators, network resilience and dependence on star collaborators, network clustering, and network assortativity by number of collaborators.