Collaboration in an Open Data eScience: A Case Study of Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Zhang, Jian; Chen, Chaomei

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/14948 Copy

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Title

Collaboration in an Open Data eScience: A Case Study of Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Author(s)

• Zhang, Jian
• Chen, Chaomei

Issue Date

2010-02-03

Keyword(s)

• Open Data
• Coauthor Network
• Social Network Model
• Smallworld Network
• Topological Analysis

Abstract

Current science and technology has produced more and more publically accessible scientific data. However, little is known about how the open data trend impacts a scientific community, specifically in terms of its collaboration behaviors. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of scientific collaboration in the open data eScience environment via a case study of co-author networks of an active and highly cited open data project, called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We visualized the co-authoring networks and measured their properties over time at three levels: author, institution, and country levels. We compared these measurements to a random network model and also compared results across the three levels. The study found that 1) the collaboration networks of the SDSS community transformed from random networks to small-world networks; 2) the number of author-level collaboration instances has not changed much over time, while the number of collaboration instances at the other two levels has increased over time; 3) pairwise institutional collaboration become common in recent years. The open data trend may have both positive and negative impacts on scientific collaboration.

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14948

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