Scientific collaboration network of Turkey

Abstract Networking via co-authorship is an important area of research and used in many fields such as ranking of the universities/departments. Studying on the data supplied by the Web of Science, we constructed a structural database that defines the scientific collaboration network of the authors from Turkey, based on the publications between 1980 and 2010. To uncover the evolution and structure of this complex network by scientific means, we executed some empirical measurements. The Turkish scientific collaboration network is in an accelerating phase in growth, highly governed by the national policies aiming to develop a competitive higher education system in Turkey. As our results suggest the authors tend to make more number of collaborations in their studies over the years. The results also showed that, node separation of the network slightly converges about 4, consistent with the small world phenomenon. Together with this key indicator, the high clustering coefficient, (which is about 0.75) reveals that our network is strongly interconnected. Another quantity of major interest about such networks is, “the degree distribution”. It has a power-law tail that defines the network as scale-free. Along with the final values, the time evolutions of the above-mentioned parameters are presented in detail with this work. In a good agreement with the recent studies, our network yields some significant differences especially in growing rate, clustering properties and node separation. In contrast with the recent studies, we also showed that preferring to attach popular nodes result with being a more popular node in the future.

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