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Dear Balasz,

Interesting; and the number of islands is a bit disconcerting indeed!
You restricted the publications to the top 5 per author; which led to
3543 persons authoring 1689 publications. Less than half a
first-authored publication per person, which is not a lot. It would be
interesting to see how much fragmentation persist when using more papers
per author. Another issue is that number of authors per paper may differ
between disciplines. Still another issue is that science is
intercontinental and that restricting the network to European authors
cuts off an important part. What if we are all connected through our New
Zealand co-authors?

Nice work, cheerio,
Tom

Balazs Vedres wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       Social Networks Discussion Forum <[log in to unmask]>
> Poster:       Balazs Vedres <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject:      Fragmentation of the European network science field
> ------------------------------------
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> We have preliminary findings about the fragmentation of the European =
> network science field:
> 
> http://www.ceu.hu/cns/ans/euns
> 
> With Marco Scotti and Mariya Ivancheva we mapped the co-authorship  =
> network of European network science. We included all scientists with a  =
> European affiliation who presented a paper at the INSNA Sunbelt  conference=
> s or the NetSci annual conferences between 2005 and 2008 - 532  scholars. =
> We looked up the top 5 most cited publications of these  scholars, and =
> included their co-authors in a dataset, that ultimately  contains 3543 =
> persons authoring 1689 publications.
> 
> We  simulated scenarios  when European authors are free to choose any  =
> co-author, from any country  or field. The only contraint that we kept  is =
> that the number of  authors, the number of publications, and the  =
> distribution of authors per  publications needs to stay the same.  In the =
> one thousand simulations the average number of components was 139, with a =
> range of 98 to 166. The observed co-authorship network has 240 components, =
> a high number that is not likely to arise by chance. The bottom panel =
> shows the relative size of the largest component to the size of the =
> network. In a fragmented system the largest component does not gather a =
> large fraction of the network. In our simulations the largest component on =
> the average gathers 91.2% of all nodes, with a range between 89.1% and =
> 93.4%. The observed proportion of the largest component is 18.6%, way =
> smaller that we would expect in an "unbiased" system.
> 
> Does anyone have comparable data on the US networks field?
> 
> 
> Best
> Balazs
> 
> 
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-- 
================================================
Tom A.B. Snijders
Professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences
University of Oxford

Professor of Statistics and Methodology
Department of Sociology, University of Groningen

for addresses and telephone numbers: see
http://stat.gamma.rug.nl/snijders/

_____________________________________________________________________
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