A bibliometric study of research topics, collaboration and centrality in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

TL;DR

This bibliometric study analyzes research topics, collaboration patterns, and author centrality in the Prisoner's Dilemma field, revealing dominant topics, collaboration structures, and the field's ongoing scholarly interest.

Contribution

It identifies key research topics and collaboration patterns in the Prisoner's Dilemma, providing new insights into the structure and dynamics of research communities.

Findings

Five main research topics identified over time

Prisoner's Dilemma is a continuously active research field

Authors tend to collaborate within communities rather than across them

Abstract

This manuscript explores the research topics and collaborative behaviour of authors in the field of the Prisoner's Dilemma using topic modeling and a graph theoretic analysis of the co-authorship network. The analysis identified five research topics in the Prisoner's Dilemma which have been relevant over the course of time. These are human subject research, biological studies, strategies, evolutionary dynamics on networks and modeling problems as a Prisoner's Dilemma game. Moreover, the results demonstrated the Prisoner's Dilemma is a field of continued interest, and that it is a collaborative field compared to other game theoretic fields. The co-authorship network suggests that authors are focused on their communities and that not many connections across the communities are made. The most central authors of the network are the authors connected to the main cluster. Through examining the networks of topics, it was uncovered that the main cluster is characterised by the collaboration of authors in a single topic. These findings add to the bibliometrics study in another field and present new questions and avenues of research to understand the reasons for the measured behaviours.