Overlapping Community Structure in Co-authorship Networks: a Case Study

TL;DR

This study investigates the overlapping community structure in a large co-authorship network, revealing that the community network shares similar properties with the original, offering a practical way to analyze complex networks.

Contribution

It provides an extensive analysis of overlapping community structures in co-authorship networks and demonstrates that community networks can effectively represent the original network's properties.

Findings

Community networks share similar topological properties with co-authorship networks.

Community networks are smaller and more practical for analysis.

Overlapping communities reveal functional groupings in scientific collaborations.

Abstract

Community structure is one of the key properties of real-world complex networks. It plays a crucial role in their behaviors and topology. While an important work has been done on the issue of community detection, very little attention has been devoted to the analysis of the community structure. In this paper, we present an extensive investigation of the overlapping community network deduced from a large-scale co-authorship network. The nodes of the overlapping community network represent the functional communities of the co-authorship network, and the links account for the fact that communities share some nodes in the co-authorship network. The comparative evaluation of the topological properties of these two networks shows that they share similar topological properties. These results are very interesting. Indeed, the network of communities seems to be a good representative of the original co-authorship network. With its smaller size, it may be more practical in order to realize various analyses that cannot be performed easily in large-scale real-world networks.