Prominence in networks: A co-evolving process

Abstract

We investigate how people and objects that they create (artifacts) gain prominence in collaborative networks. As an example, consider academic research communities where people and their artifacts (research papers) both have prominence. But, these prominence values are linked to each other and evolve together. In particular, for an author to make an impact on the scientific community, she has to interact with diverse sets of individuals. The results of this is that her research will be known by a large number of communities. However, the research communities and topics have to be aligned along her research interests as well. Peer reviewers have to know and understand the research field and the results must be disseminated to the larger community through sustained interest in the given research field. Hence, the prominence of individuals and their artifacts evolve simultaneously. In this paper, we develop novel methods to study both types of evolution processes and show their effectiveness using the DBLP dataset.