Complete trails of co-authorship network evolution

Abstract

The rise and fall of a research field is the cumulative outcome of its intrinsic scientific value and social coordination among scientists. The structure of the social component is quantifiable by the social network of researchers linked via co-authorship relations, which can be tracked through digital records. Here, we use such co-authorship data in theoretical physics and study their complete evolutionary trail since inception, with a particular emphasis on the early transient stages. We find that the co-authorship networks evolve through three common major processes in time: the nucleation of small isolated components, the formation of a tree-like giant component through cluster aggregation, and the entanglement of the network by large-scale loops. The giant component is constantly changing yet robust upon link degradations, forming the network's dynamic core. The observed patterns are successfully reproducible through a new network model.

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• Network assembly of scientific communities of varying size and specificity
• Nucleation in scale-free networks
• Topological estimation of the latent geometry of a complex network
• Diversity and critical behavior in prisoner's dilemma game
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• Coevolutionary Dynamics of Group Interactions: Coevolving Nonlinear Voter Models
• Anomalous percolation transitions beyond the BKT transition in growing networks