Co-Authorship Networks in the Digital Library Research Community

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the evolution of the digital library research community over a decade using social network analysis of co-authorship networks, introducing new impact metrics and examining international participation.

Contribution

It introduces a weighted directional co-authorship network model and the AuthorRank metric, providing new insights into author impact and collaboration patterns.

Findings

PageRank and AuthorRank outperform traditional centrality measures.

The network analysis reveals key authors and collaboration trends.

International participation in JCDL is significant and evolving.

Abstract

The field of digital libraries (DLs) coalesced in 1994: the first digital library conferences were held that year, awareness of the World Wide Web was accelerating, and the National Science Foundation awarded $24 Million (U.S.) for the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). In this paper we examine the state of the DL domain after a decade of activity by applying social network analysis to the co-authorship network of the past ACM, IEEE, and joint ACM/IEEE digital library conferences. We base our analysis on a common binary undirectional network model to represent the co-authorship network, and from it we extract several established network measures. We also introduce a weighted directional network model to represent the co-authorship network, for which we define $AuthorRank$ as an indicator of the impact of an individual author in the network. The results are validated against conference program committee members in the same period. The results show clear advantages of PageRank and AuthorRank over degree, closeness and betweenness centrality metrics. We also investigate the amount and nature of international participation in Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).