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Twenty Years of Network Science: A Bibliographic and Co-authorship Network Analysis

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Big Data and Social Media Analytics

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

Two decades ago three pioneering papers turned the attention to complex networks and initiated a new era of research, establishing an interdisciplinary field called network science. Namely, these highly-cited seminal papers were written by Watts and Strogatz, Barabási and Albert, and Girvan and Newman on small-world networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex networks, respectively. In the past 20 years – due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field – a diverse but not divided network science community has emerged. In this chapter, we investigate how this community has evolved over time with respect to speed, diversity and interdisciplinary nature as seen through the growing co-authorship network of network scientists (here the notion refers to a scholar with at least one paper citing at least one of the three aforementioned milestone papers). After providing a bibliographic analysis of 31,763 network science papers, we construct the co-authorship network of 56,646 network scientists and we analyze its topology and dynamics. We shed light on the collaboration patterns of the last 20 years of network science by investigating numerous structural properties of the co-authorship network and by using enhanced data visualization techniques. We also identify the most central authors, the largest communities, investigate the spatiotemporal changes, and compare the properties of the network to scientometric indicators.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their observations and comment. The research reported in this chapter and carried out at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics has been supported by the National Research Development and Innovation Fund based on the charter of bolster issued by the National Research Development and Innovation Office under the auspices of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology. The research of Roland Molontay was partially supported by the NKFIH K123782 research grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Stochastics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

    Roland Molontay & Marcell Nagy

  2. MTA–BME Stochastics Research Group, Budapest, Hungary

    Roland Molontay

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  1. Roland Molontay
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  2. Marcell Nagy
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Correspondence to Roland Molontay .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bilkent yerleşkesi, Turkish Ministry of Health, Çankaya, Ankara, Turkey

    Mehmet Çakırtaş

  2. Computer Engineering, Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Mehmet Kemal Ozdemir

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Molontay, R., Nagy, M. (2021). Twenty Years of Network Science: A Bibliographic and Co-authorship Network Analysis. In: Çakırtaş, M., Ozdemir, M.K. (eds) Big Data and Social Media Analytics. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67044-3_1

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