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Improving co-authorship network structures by combining multiple data sources: evidence from Italian academic statisticians

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Abstract

The aim of the present contribution is to merge bibliographic data for members of a bounded scientific community in order to derive a complete unified archive, with top-international and nationally oriented production, as a new basis to carry out network analysis on a unified co-authorship network. A two-step procedure is used to deal with the identification of duplicate records and the author name disambiguation. Specifically, for the second step we strongly drew inspiration from a well-established unsupervised disambiguation method proposed in the literature following a network-based approach and requiring a restricted set of record attributes. Evidences from Italian academic statisticians were provided by merging data from three bibliographic archives. Non-negligible differences were observed in network results in the comparison of disambiguated and not disambiguated data sets, especially in network measures at individual level.

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Notes

  1. Two international databases, one general (WoS) and one thematic (Current Index to Statistics, CIS) were considered, together with bibliographic information retrieved from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) database of nationally funded research projects (PRIN).

  2. At December 2014 the size of population was 722.

  3. Although PRIN funding was launched in 1996, information on funded projects has been released only since the year 2000.

  4. For deepening on this problem, the reader can refer to Bilenko et al. (2003).

  5. For instance, Lee et al. (2005) and Santana et al. (2015) supposed different weights according to the discriminative capability of the attributes.

  6. A co-authorship network is derived from the matrix product \(\mathbf {Y}=\mathbf {A}\mathbf {A}'\), where \(\mathbf {A}\) is a \(n \times p\) affiliation matrix, with elements \(a_{ik}\) = 1 if \(i \in \mathcal {N}\) authored the publication \(k \in {\mathcal {P}}\), 0 otherwise. The matrix \(\mathbf {Y}\) is the undirected and valued \(n \times n\) adjacency matrix with element \(y_{ij}\) greater than 0 if \(i,\,j \in \mathcal {N}\) co-authored one or more publications in \(\mathcal {P}\), and otherwise 0. The binary version of \(\mathbf {Y}\), setting all entries in the valued adjacency matrix greater than zero to 1, was used in our analysis.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Andreas Strotmann for providing details on the algorithm code adopted in Strotmann et al. (2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084, Fisciano, SA, Italy

    Vittorio Fuccella

  2. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Trieste, Piazzale Europa, 1, 34127, Trieste, Italy

    Domenico De Stefano

  3. Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084, Fisciano, SA, Italy

    Maria Prosperina Vitale

  4. Department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics “B. de Finetti”, University of Trieste, Piazzale Europa, 1, 34127, Trieste, Italy

    Susanna Zaccarin

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  1. Vittorio Fuccella
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  2. Domenico De Stefano
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  3. Maria Prosperina Vitale
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  4. Susanna Zaccarin
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Correspondence to Vittorio Fuccella.

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Fuccella, V., De Stefano, D., Vitale, M.P. et al. Improving co-authorship network structures by combining multiple data sources: evidence from Italian academic statisticians. Scientometrics 107, 167–184 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1872-y

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