| Social network analysis (SNA) has been used extensively to study behavior of organizations, social network such as Facebook and Twitter, political groups, and family relations. SNA helps us to understand how the network evolves over short and long time periods by identifying crucial members of the network in terms of their connections with several other members of the network. In this study, we carry out SNA to measure the impact of research funds on researchers by analyzing their collaborative work in terms of their publications. In particular, we study the impact of an Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a National Science Foundation (NSF) program, of Arkansas Advancing and Supporting Science, Engineering and Technology (ASSET II) on researchers in the state of Arkansas. We use the publications dataset available for a period of four years of the ASSET II project to measure the impact both qualitatively, through social network graphs, and quantitatively, through statistical measures such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. Through our analysis, we identified a list of key researchers who strengthened the collaborative network in terms of their contributions, importance, and participation. |
