Structure And Evolution Of Co-authorship Network:The Case Of Chinese Inland Scholars

Collaborations between countries,agencies,and scholars have become an increasingly more important way in all fields of scientific research.Collaborations may contribute to the pool and exchange of knowledge and resources as well as the generation of new ideas,and improve the scientific research quality and research output.As an important form of collaboration,the quantity and quality of co-authored papers may reflect the strength and intensity of collaboration,which can be used to measure the development of academic network and research output.This paper chooses co-authorship network by Chinese inland scholars to analyze the structure and evolution characteristics of co-authorship network and the driving factors of coauthorship.Extant literature on co-authorship networks mainly focuses on two different streams of research:(1)the first research stream focuses on the characteristics of co-authorship network structure are described by establishing a network model and calculating network indicators,and core actors are to be found based on network centricity analysis.(2)the second research stream focuses on the evolution characteristics of co-authorship network by describing the static properties of the network in stages,and investigates the driving factors of co-authorship.However,extant literature lacks of analysis of coauthorship network structure and evolution characteristics from a microscopic perspective,and few researches thus far have investigated quantitatively the evolution of co-authorship networks,especially the endogenous factors driving the network evolution.Based on the articles published by Chinese inland scholars in 35 SCI and SSCI journals in the field of information science,by measuring network indicators of the centrality,structural holes,and cohesive subgroup,we find that the network density of Chinese inland scholars is low and co-authorship is loose;Co-authorship are mainly generated from internal group,cliques are independent and have less collaboration;20 core authors are defined by network centrality,and we analyze the evolution of the core author networks,the results show network location,similarity,and prior collaboration experiences have a certain influence on the formation of collaboration relationships.Because variables is not completely independent,and conventional test statistics may provide misleading standard errors and significance levels,this article uses QAP and MRQAP analysis method establish regression model,the empirical results show that,central positions of authors in co-authorship networks may lead to the establishment coauthorships;The similarities and prior collaboration experiences may also lead to the formation of co-authorships.Specifically,authorships,and prior collaboration experiences will lead to the continuation co-authorship.