Collaboration networks of arab biomedical researchers

Abstract

Social networks (SN) consist of a set of actors and connections between them. A collaboration network (ColNet) is a special type of SN, in which the actors represent researchers and the link between them indicate that they have co-authored at least one paper. ColNet analysis reveals how researchers interact and behave. A wide range of applications can be based on such studies. The current works on ColNet usually focus on a specific domain/discipline, country/geographical region or time interval. In our study, we focus on one of the understudied regions (the Arab world), and present a novel study on the ColNet of researchers in this region. The domain of interest in our study is biomedicine. We construct, analyze, and study ColNet of biomedical researchers in the Arab world. We divide the region of interest (the Arab world) into four geographical regions and look into the evolution of ColNet of each region separately over time. Our analysis reveals that there is an increase in the number of both authors and publications over time, and that authors tend to work in increasingly larger groups rather than working individually, which is consistent with what is assumed about the nature of research in this field. Our analysis also reveals that a researcher’s productivity is correlated with the amount of change in his/her circle of collaborators over time. For example, researchers working in stable or fixed groups and researchers who have completely different research group every few years are not necessarily the most productive ones.