Searching Promising Researchers through Network Centrality Measures of Co-author Networks of Technical Papers

This paper proposes a method of searching for promising young researchers using network centrality of co-author relationship. This method estimates researchers' potential based on transition of betweenness centralities in co-author networks. We thought that excellent researchers always show high betweenness centralities, in contrast, betweenness centralities of promising researchers will grow with time. As a result of network analysis, we detected some researchers with growing betweenness centralities from the academic paper database of Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). In addition, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellows who had been evaluated as a promising young researcher by JSPS showed growing betweenness centralities. Therefore, our proposed method is useful to search for promising young researchers in collaborative research fields such as biological science.