The Structure of Collaboration Networks: An Illustration of Indian Economics

Abstract

The main aim of this study is twofold: first, to examine the underlying structure of co-authorship in Indian economics; and second, to explore the link between the participation in scientific collaborations and academic visibility. We decipher the structure of co-authorship by presenting collaboration networks of scholars who published articles in six Indian economics journals during 1966-2005, which is split into four windows: 1966-75, 1976-85, 1986-95, and 1996-2005. In this study, the following social network measures are applied: the size of the network, the size of the main component, average degree, path length, and clustering coefficient. The study presents the following three features of Indian economics: first, a substantial proportion of Indian authors are isolated, albeit declining very slowly over a period of time; second, it appears that the structure of scholarly collaboration in Indian economics is highly fragmented, and the observed size of main components accounts for a small proportion of the total authors; third, and more importantly, the size and composition of co-authorship networks presented in the paper seldom impact the scientific visibility of authors.