Exploring the role and nature of interactions between Institutes in a Local Affiliation Network

TL;DR

This study analyzes collaboration and citation networks among Indian Institutes in APS journals from 1970-2013, revealing that institutional characteristics, especially funding, influence network structure and knowledge flow more than geographic proximity.

Contribution

It uncovers the dominant role of institutional attributes over geographic distance in shaping collaboration and citation networks among Indian Institutes.

Findings

Institutional characteristics outweigh geographic proximity in collaboration.

Institutions with better funding dominate the network topology.

Strong link between collaboration and citation flow across institutions.

Abstract

In this work, we have studied the collaboration and citation network between Indian Institutes from publications in American Physical Society(APS) journals between 1970-2013. We investigate the role of geographic proximity on the network structure and find that it is the characteristics of the Institution, rather than the geographic distance, that plays a dominant role in collaboration networks. We find that Institutions with better federal funding dominate the network topology and play a crucial role in overall research output. We find that the citation flow across different categories of institutions is strongly linked to the collaborations between them. We have estimated the knowledge flow in and out of Institutions and identified the top knowledge source and sinks.