SLIS Events News

Graduate students, staff, and faculty are cordially invited to attend the SLIS Colloquium Series.

Title: The Simultaneous Evolution of Article and Author Networks
Speaker: Katy Brner, School of Library and Information Science
Date: Friday, November 14, 2003
Time: 1:00-2:30pm
Place: LI001 Main Library

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and coffee, available at 12:45pm.

Abstract
There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind's scientific endeavor. Most research in Bibliometrics or Scientometrics has focused on 'descriptive models' that aim to describe the major features of a (typically static) data set. For example, research has studied the statistical patterns of article citation counts, networks of citations, individual differences in citation practice, the composition of knowledge domains, and the identification of research fronts as indicated by new but highly cited papers. Recent work in Sociology and Dynamic Systems aims to design 'process models' that recreate real world networks (e.g., co-author and paper-citation networks) in terms of their statistics and temporal dynamics.

This talk introduces a simple process model that simultaneously grows co-author and paper-citation networks. The statistical and dynamic properties of the networks generated by this model are validated against a data set of articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) - about 45,000 papers, 114,000 citation references, and 106,000 unique authors. Although prior research has interrelated more than one scientific structure (e.g., authors, publications, patents), the current work is unique in simulating the growth of several structures simultaneously. The core assumption of the model is that the twin networks of scientific researchers and scholarly articles mutually support one another. Researchers connect articles to one another in co-citation networks, and articles link researchers to one another in co-authorship networks. Preferential attachment is modeled as an emergent property of the elementary networking activity of authors reading and citing articles, and also the references listed in articles. Analogously, authors may consider collaborating with co-authors of their co-authors. Collaborators on this work are Jeegar Maru and Robert L. Goldstone, Indiana University.

Bio
Katy Brner is assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science, adjunct assistant professor of Informatics, and member of the core faculty in Cognitive Science. She conducts research on the design and evaluation of visual interfaces to digital libraries that take into account principles of human vision and spatial cognition to improve information access. She has co-organized international and IU workshops and conferences on this topic. Her research is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, SBC (formerly Ameritech), IU High Performance Network Applications Program (HPNAP), and an equipment grant by SUN Microsystems.

Posted Nov. 6, 2003