Measuring contextual partner importance in scientific collaboration networks

Scientific collaboration commonly takes place in a global and competitive environment. Coalitions and consortia are formed among universities, companies and research institutes to apply for research grants and to perform joint projects. In such a competitive environment, individual institutes may be strategic partners or competitors. Measures to determine partner importance have practical applications such as comparison and rating of competitors, reputation evaluation or performance evaluation of companies and institutes. Many network-centric metrics exist to measure the important of individuals or companies in social and collaborative networks. Here we present a novel context-based metric to measure the importance of partners in scientific collaboration networks. Well-established graph models such as the notion of hubs and authorities provide the basis for this work and are systematically extended to a flexible, context-aware network importance measure.