Publication Networks among Medical Schools
Publications can be represented in a graph such that each node is a medical school and each edge represents co-authorship between representastives from the school. In the research described in the above article, a “collaborative 12-year data set of 35,469 published articles in the SCOPUS® database was analyzed.” Within this network, power was analyzed with “degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality,” revealing nodes that had more power acting as gatekeepers. This is directly related to the discussion on power within networks from class.
Interestingly, this experiment involved searching for “key players” by finding those with more power and deleting them using the KeyPlayer algorithm, which would remove a node and check if the average distance between nodes would increase. There were many other metrics used as well; the paper includes many different analyses, and based on them all, came to the conclusion that the role of the “gatekeeper” is slowly decreasing in influence over time, although Seoul National University is consistently a “key player”. This makes sense, given that the reputation of the school, while the overall decreasing power of gatekeeper may be a result of simplified communication over internet and information access.