Um Estudo sobre a evolução temporal de comunidades científicas

Abstract

Several efforts have been aimed at understanding and modeling dynamic aspects of scientific communities. Despite the great interest, little is known about the role that different members play in the formation of the underlying network structure of such communities. In this dissertation, we investigate the roles that members of the core of scientific communities play in the collaboration network structure formation and evolution. To do that, we define a community core based on a metric, named CoScore, which is an h-index derived metric that captures both, the prolificness and the involvement of researchers in a community. Our results provide a number of key observations related to community formation and evolving patterns. Particularly, we show that members of the community core work as bridges that connect smaller clustered research groups. Furthermore, these members are responsible for an increase in the average degree of the whole community underlying network and a decrease on the overall network assortativeness. More important, we note that variations on the members set that make up the community core tend to be strongly correlated with variations on these metrics. We also show that our observations are important to characterize the role of key members on community formation and structure.