2010/03/23 by Staša Milojević · 103 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Complex network #Computer science #Data science #Field (mathematics) #Mathematics #Physics #Power (physics) #Preferential attachment #Pure mathematics #World Wide Web #cs.DL #physics.soc-ph #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/asi.21331
published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(7), 1410-1423 (Wiley) · Accepted for publication in JASIST
openalex publication_date 2010/03/23 · arxiv created 2010/04/29 · arxiv updated 2010/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract The goal of the study was to determine the underlying processes leading to the observed collaborator distribution in modern scientific fields, with special attention to nonpower‐law behavior. Nanoscience is used as a case study of a modern interdisciplinary field and its coauthorship network for 2000–2004 period is constructed from the NanoBank database. We find three collaboration modes that correspond to three distinct ranges in the distribution of collaborators: (1) for authors with fewer than 20 collaborators (the majority) preferential attachment does not hold and they form a log‐normal “hook” instead of a power law; (2) authors with more than 20 collaborators benefit from preferential attachment and form a power law tail; and (3) authors with between 250 and 800 collaborators are more frequent than expected because of the hyperauthorship practices in certain subfields.