Predicting co-author relationship in medical co-authorship networks

PLoS One. 2014 Jul 3;9(7):e101214. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101214. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Research collaborations are encouraged because a synergistic effect yielding good results often appears. However, creating and organizing a strong research group is a difficult task. One of the greatest concerns of an individual researcher is locating potential collaborators whose expertise complement his best. In this paper, we propose a method that makes link predictions in co-authorship networks, where topological features between authors such as Adamic/Adar, Common Neighbors, Jaccard's Coefficient, Preferential Attachment, Katzβ, and PropFlow may be good indicators of their future collaborations. Firstly, these topological features were systematically extracted from the network. Then, supervised models were used to learn the best weights associated with different topological features in deciding co-author relationships. Finally, we tested our models on the co-authorship networks in the research field of Coronary Artery Disease and obtained encouraging accuracy (the precision, recall, F1 score and AUC were, respectively, 0.696, 0.677, 0.671 and 0.742 for Logistic Regression, and respectively, 0.697, 0.678, 0.671 and 0.743 for SVM). This suggests that our models could be used to build and manage strong research groups.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Authorship*
  • Bibliometrics*
  • Cooperative Behavior
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Publishing

Grants and funding

The research reported in this paper was done as part of the project “Cooperation Analysis of Technology Innovation Team Member Based on Knowledge Network-Empirical Evidence in the Biology and Biomedicine Field (No. 71103114)” supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the project “Scientific and Technological Collaboration in the Field of Biomedicine - Using Co-authorship and Co-inventorship Analysis (No. 71240006)” supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.