Connection and Stratification in Research Collaboration: An Analysis of the COLLNET Network

The co-authorship network of scientists represents a prototype of social networks. By mapping the graph containing all relevant publications of members in an international collaboration network: COLLNET, we infer the structural mechanisms that govern the topology of this social system. Structure of the network effect not only individual’s collaboration pattern deeply, but knowledge flowing process profoundly. However, a single view is not enough to grasp the characters of the network in details. We have to either produce global view on the structure of the network as a whole, or make a detailed inspection of some features of individuals. In this paper, some techniques for analyzing complex networks (different approaches to identify “interesting” individuals and groups, analysis of internal structure of the main core and hierarchical clustering) and visualizations of their parts are presented on the case of COLLNET collaboration graph.