The long-term dynamics of co-authorship scientific networks, Iberoamerican Countries (1973-2006)

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the long-term evolution of co-authorship networks among Iberoamerican countries from 1973 to 2006, revealing exponential growth in publications and a scale-free network structure driven by preferential attachment.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model based on preferential attachment to explain the quadratic growth of co-authorship links and identifies the timing of network self-organization in regional scientific collaboration.

Findings

Scientific publications grow exponentially over time.

Co-authorship networks follow a scale-free, power-law distribution.

The formation of the scale-free network peaks around 1981.4, linked to regional brain-drainage.

Abstract

We study the national production of academic knowledge in all Iberoamerican countries (IAC) between 1973 and 2007. We show that the total number of mainstream scientific publications listed in SCI,SSCI and A&HCI follows an exponential growth, the same as the national productivity expressed in the number of publications per capita. We also explore the temporal evolution of the co-authorship patterns between a sample of 12 IAC responsible for 98% of the total regional publications, with a group of other 45 nations. We show that the scientific co-authorship among countries follows a power-law and behaves as a self-organizing scale-free network, where each country appears as a node and each co-publication as a link. We develop a mathematical model to study the temporal evolution of co-authorship networks, based on a preferential attachment strategy and we show that the number of co-publications among countries growths quadraticly against time. We empirically determine the quadratic growth constants for 352 different networks within. We corroborate that the connectivity of regional countries with larger scientific networks is growing faster than with other less connected countries. We determine the dates, at which the co-authorship connectivities trigger the self-organizing scale free network for each of the 352 cases. We find that the last follows a normal distribution around year 1981.4 +/-2.2 and we connect the last effect with a brain-drainage process generated in the region. We show how the number of co-publications Pki (t) between country k and country i, is related with a power-law against the coupling growth coefficients aki.