Modelling Social and Scientific Collaboration Networks

This project looks at a scientific collaboration network mined from the Mendeley database and finds novel patterns and clusters in the

data that may reflect past foreign policies and contemporary geopolitics. It gives insights into how scientific development of developing countries can be guided.

We find interesting clusters of countries with different characteristics of collaboration.

Some of these clusters are dominated by developed countries that have higher number of self connections compared with connections to other countries. Another cluster is dominated by impoverished nations that have mostly connections and collaborations with other countries but fewer self connections.

The countries in the lower right corner of the plot below are developing nations and the countries in the upper left are developed countries (each dot is a nation).

You can read the full paper here, some slides are here and a talk on this work can be found here.