Exploratory Analysis of Communities in Co-authorship Networks: A Case Study

Abstract

Digital libraries enable worldwide access to scientific results, but also provide a valuable source of information that can be used to investigate patterns and trends in scientific collaboration. The Electronic Library of the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (eLib) digitizes the most prominent mathematical journals printed in Serbia. Using eLib bibliographical records we constructed a co-authorship network representing collaborations between authors who published their papers in eLib journals in the period from 1932 to 2011. In this paper we apply community detection techniques in order to examine the structure of the eLib co-authorship network. Such study reveals characteristic patterns of scientific collaboration in Serbian mathematical journals, and helps us to understand the (self-)organization of the eLib community of authors.