Interdisciplinary patterns of a university: Investigating collaboration using co-publication network analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes interdisciplinary collaboration patterns at University College Dublin over a decade using social network analysis of co-publications, revealing increased intra-school collaborations and differences from random matching models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of social network analysis to distinguish small and big interdisciplinarity in university collaborations.

Findings

Collaborations within UC Dublin nearly doubled from 1998 to 2007.

Intra-school collaborations increased significantly over the period.

Collaborations differ from random matching models in their patterns.

Abstract

We investigate collaborative and interdisciplinary research features of University College Dublin, using methods from social network analysis to analyze and visualize (co-)publications covered by the Web of Science from 1998 through 2007. We account for the extent of interdisciplinarity in collaborations, distinguishing collaborations between schools within one college ("small interdisciplinarity") from collaborations between schools in different colleges ("big interdisciplinarity"). Based on the interdisciplinary nature, we compare the types of collaboration to a model of random matching across units, observing several marked differences. During the period of consideration, collaborations within UC Dublin nearly doubled, almost entirely due to the increasing level of intra-school collaborations.