Abstract
This manuscript explores the research topics and collaborative behaviour of authors in the field of the Prisoner’s Dilemma using topic modeling and a graph theoretic analysis of the co-authorship network. The analysis identified five research topics in the Prisoner’s Dilemma which have been relevant over the course of time. These are human subject research, biological studies, strategies, evolutionary dynamics on networks and modeling problems as a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Moreover, the results demonstrated the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a field of continued interest, and that it is a collaborative field compared to other game theoretic fields. The co-authorship network suggests that authors are focused on their communities and that not many connections across the communities are made. The most central authors of the network are the authors connected to the main cluster. Through examining the networks of topics, it was uncovered that the main cluster is characterised by the collaboration of authors in a single topic. These findings add to the bibliometrics study in another field and present new questions and avenues of research to understand the reasons for the measured behaviours.
Highlights
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is a well known game used since its introduction in the 1950’s (Flood, 1958) as a framework for studying the emergence of cooperation; a topic of continued interest for mathematical, social, biological and ecological sciences
It presents a number of research topics in the PD publications, which have been identified using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Blei et al, 2003), and it explores the changes in the research topics over time
The analysis demonstrated that the PD is a field that continues to attract academic attention and publications
Summary
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is a well known game used since its introduction in the 1950’s (Flood, 1958) as a framework for studying the emergence of cooperation; a topic of continued interest for mathematical, social, biological and ecological sciences This manuscript presents a bibliometric analysis of 2420 published articles on the Prisoner’s Dilemma between 1951 and 2018. Most academic research is undertaken in the form of collaborative effort and as (Kyvik and Reymert, 2017) points out, it is rational that two or more people have the potential to do better as a group than individually. This is the very premise of the PD itself. Citations can be missed due to data entry errors, academics are influenced by many more papers than they cite and several of the citations are superficial
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