Social network analysis of research collaboration in information reuse and integration

The study of information reuse and integration (IRI) is a young research field and the increasing degrees of collaboration in this field can be attributed to a predominant trend of networked publication co-authorship which itself contributes a feedback effect to the growth of the IRI community as a whole. Our analysis is based on the positive trends in the IRI community over the process of research and knowledge diffusion. Prolific researchers often initiate new ideas and achieve impacts on the whole research community. The objective of our analysis is to provide accurate viewpoints into the social-networking nature among research collaborations, including identifications of prolific researchers and research groups, trends of their collaborations, and impacts to the research community. By applying analytical processes that discover various collaboration and networking degrees exhibited in the publication co-authorship statistics obtained from our IRI community, we are able to synthesize results which identify research groups, collaboration patterns, and trends.