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A geographical analysis of knowledge production in computer science

Published: 20 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We analyze knowledge production in Computer Science by means of coauthorship networks. For this, we consider 30 graduate programs of different regions of the world, being 8 programs in Brazil, 16 in North America (3 in Canada and 13 in the United States), and 6 in Europe (2 in France, 1 in Switzerland and 3 in the United Kingdom). We use a dataset that consists of 176,537 authors and 352,766 publication entries distributed among 2,176 publication venues. The results obtained for different metrics of collaboration social networks indicate the process of knowledge creation has  changed differently for each region. Research is increasingly done in teams across different fields of Computer Science. The size of the giant component indicates the existence of isolated collaboration groups in the European network, contrasting to the degree of connectivity found in the Brazilian and North-American counterparts. We also analyzed the temporal evolution of the social networks representing the three regions. The number of authors per paper experienced an increase in a time span of 12 years. We observe that the number of collaborations between authors grows faster than the number of authors, benefiting from the existing network structure. The temporal evolution shows differences between well-established fields, such as Databases and Computer Architecture, and emerging fields, like Bioinformatics and Geoinformatics. The patterns of collaboration analyzed in this paper contribute to an overall understanding of Computer Science research in different geographical regions that could not be achieved without the use of complex networks and a large publication database.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
    April 2009
    1280 pages
    ISBN:9781605584874
    DOI:10.1145/1526709

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 20 April 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. coauthorship networks
    2. collaboration social networks
    3. computer science

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    • (2020)An analysis of the collaboration network of the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling at the Age of 40Data & Knowledge Engineering10.1016/j.datak.2020.101866(101866)Online publication date: Oct-2020
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