Collaboration in Computer Science: A Network Science Approach

Co-authorship in publications within a discipline uncovers interesting properties of the analyzed field. We represent collaboration in academic papers of computer science in terms of differently grained networks, namely affiliation and collaboration networks. We also build those sub-networks that emerge from either conference or journal co-authorship only. We take advantage of the network science paraphernalia to take a picture of computer science collaboration including all papers published in the field since 1936. Furthermore, we observe how collaboration in computer science evolved over time since 1960. We investigate bibliometric properties such as size of the discipline, productivity of scholars, and collaboration level in papers, as well as global network properties such as reachability and average separation distance among scholars, distribution of the number of scholar collaborators, network resilience and dependence on star collaborators, network clustering, and network assortativity by number of collaborators.