Multi-modal social networks for modeling scientific fields

  • Authors:

  • Georg Groh;Christoph Fuchs

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, TU München, Garching, Germany 85478;Department of Informatics, TU München, Garching, Germany 85478

  • Venue:
  • Scientometrics
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper analyzes whether methods from social network analysis can be adopted for the modeling of scientific fields in order to obtain a better understanding of the respective scientific area. The approach proposed is based on articles published within the respective scientific field and certain types of nodes deduced from these papers, such as authors, journals, conferences and organizations. As a proof of concept, the techniques discussed here are applied to the field of `Mobile Social Networking'. For this purpose, a tool was developed to create a large data collection representing the aforementioned field. The paper analyzes various views on the complete network and discusses these on the basis of the data collected on Mobile Social Networking. The authors demonstrate that the analysis of particular subgraphs derived from the data collection allows the identification of important authors as well as separate sub-disciplines such as classic network analysis and sensor networks and also contributes to the classification of the field of `Mobile Social Networking' within the greater context of computer science, applied mathematics and social sciences. Based on these results, the authors propose a set of concrete services which could be offered by such a network and which could help the user to deal with the scientific information process. The paper concludes with an outlook upon further possible research topics.