Authors: Carlos B Amat François Perruchas
Publish Date: 2016/04/27
Volume: 108, Issue: 1, Pages: 41-56
Abstract
Research collaboration is necessary rewarding and beneficial Cohesion between team members is related to their collective efficiency To assess collaboration processes and their eventual outcomes agencies need innovative methods—and social network approaches are emerging as a useful analytical tool We identified the research output and citation data of a network of 61 research groups formally engaged in publishing rare disease research between 2000 and 2013 We drew the collaboration networks for each year and computed the global and local measures throughout the period Although global network measures remained steady over the whole period the local and subgroup metrics revealed a growing cohesion between the teams Transitivity and density showed little or no variation throughout the period In contrast the following points indicated an evolution towards greater network cohesion the emergence of a giant component which grew from just 30 to reach 85 of groups the decreasing number of communities following a tripling in the average number of members the growing number of fully connected subgroups and increasing average strength Moreover assortativity measures reveal that after an initial period where subject affinity and a common geographical location played some role in favouring the connection between groups the collaboration was driven in the final stages by other factors and complementarities The Spanish research network on rare diseases has evolved towards a growing cohesion—as revealed by local and subgroup metrics following social network analysis
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