Studies in Co-authorship Pairs Distribution: Part-2

Abstract

Previous studies have presented well-ordered collaboration structures of co-author pairs. Kretschmer and Kretschmer have shown that, for high impact SCI journals, the distributions of co-author pairs’ frequencies can be considered to be a reflection of a social Gestalt. This study is an extension of that work to the social sciences, namely eleven journals in women’s and gender studies. After overlapping or mixing the eleven distributions of co-author pairs, the data reveal the same tendency to a social Gestalt. However the shapes of social Gestalts for gender studies differs markedly from the corresponding shapes of the high impact SCI Journals. Simulation shows that the change of the shape from the Gestalt of the mixed journals of gender studies towards the shape of the four mixed SCI journals could be continuous.