Graph-based algorithm for exploring collaboration mechanisms and hidden patterns among top scholars

Abstract

During past several decades, extensive interdisciplinary collaboration has greatly promoted the scientific innovation. Especially, collaborations among top scholars have become major driving forces in advancing scientific progress. Therefore, this article focusses on the mechanism and modes underlying collaboration of scholars. The advantage of this paper resides in its capacity to elucidate the hierarchical architecture and dynamics of top scholars' collaboration, discern the hidden collaborative association probabilities, and provide recommendation for fostering intellectual exchange and information dissemination. Results show that: (1) In terms of collaboration features, it exhibits a significant clustering effect. The largest three communities concentrate in Asia, Europe, and North America. Meanwhile, we further introduce dominant flow analysis, an algorithm originated from the geography, to excavate hierarchy architecture of collaborations. We have identified three kinds of scholars who perform distinct roles in the dissemination of knowledge: leading scholars tend to play a guiding role, senior scholars tend to act as a bridge to enlarge the collaboration range, and general scholars predominantly contribute to the collaborations. (2) In terms of formation mechanism of collaborations, we found the collaboration of top scholars are grounded in their publications’ quality instead of quantity. Furthermore, the closed rather than opened triangular configuration potently catalyzes knowledge transmission. (3) Meanwhile, hidden collaborative partnerships are extrapolated based on the model proposed in this article. In these hidden patterns, scholars who are geographically close and have similar research background potentially develop further research collaborations, and at least one scholar in collaborations has high citations.