Abstract
AbstractThe structure, dynamics, and importance of the social network of collaboration among scientists has been already studied, sometimes yielding counter-intuitive conclusions. In this paper we investigate the role played by people who served as PC (Program Committee) members in the network formed by members of the Brazilian computer science community and their co-authors. Some characteristics of such network are compared with those reported in similar studies involving other scientific collaboration networks. As a result, we show that apart from the evidence of Milgram’s phenomenon (six degrees of separation), there is no other community with completely similar patterns (among those used for comparison). This is probably due to the unique characteristics of the target network. For instance, their members do not necessarily interact with each other in terms of co-authorship since they belong to different sub-areas of computer science. There are strong evidences that the clusters in this network are connected by non-Brazilian members. Moreover, nodes with high degrees have little connection to Brazilian authors.
Highlights
The distance between people in social networks has been the object of various studies, as e.g. the Ërdos numberOne problem normally faced by such studies is to gather data that refer to a significant number of people that compose a given social network
The goal of the present paper is to investigate the properties of part of the social network associated with the community involved with JEMS in terms of collaboration, namely the members of the program committees
It is possible to see that only one author of this list appears in the list of the top 10 authors in terms of number of publications recorded in DBLP
Summary
The distance between people in social networks has been the object of various studies, as e.g. the Ërdos numberOne problem normally faced by such studies is to gather data that refer to a significant number of people that compose a given social network. In this paper we use data related to members of program committees of several conferences in different areas of computer science. This study differs from others as it involves people that would not necessarily interact among themselves given that they work in different areas. These data refer primarily to more senior people, a characteristic that is expected when dealing with PC (program committee) members of conferences. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study that looks at social networks of a discipline with such a bias. A high number of people from many areas of computer science serve as PC members or are themselves authors, given that the majority of the conferences accept papers only in English and/or have established themselves in the international scientific community
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