Evolutionary Analysis of Collaboration Networks in Scientometrics

The research area of scientometrics began during the second half of the 19th century. After decades of growth, the international field of scientometrics has become increasingly mature. The present study intends to understand the evolution of the collaboration network in Scientometrics. The growth of the discipline is divided into three stages: the first time period (1978-1990), the second period (1991-2002), and the third period (2003-2014). Both macro-level and micro-level network measures between the studied time periods were compared. Macro-level analyses show that the degree distribution of the collaboration in each timespan are consistent with power-law, and both the average degree and average distance steadily increase with time. Micro-level structure analyses illustrate the authors with high performance in raw degree measure, degree centrality measure, and betweenness measure are dynamic in different timespans. From three dimensions (raw degree, degree centrality, and betweenness centrality), the collaboration dominators are identified in each time span. In addition, the visualization methods are applied to display the evolution of the collaboration networks for each of the three stages of scientometrics' development.