Scientific collaboration network is a social network where nodes are scientists and links are co-authorships as the latter is one of the most well documented forms of scientific collaboration.[1] It is an undirected, scale-free network where the degree distribution follows a power law with an exponential cutoff – most authors are sparsely connected while a few authors are intensively connected.[2] The network has an assortative nature – hubs tend to link to other hubs and low-degree nodes tend to link to low-degree nodes. Assortativity is not structural, meaning that it is not a consequence of the degree distribution, but it is generated by some process that governs the network’s evolution.[3]
^Glanzel, Wolfgang (2004). Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research. Springer Netherlands. ISBN978-1-4020-2755-0.