A Community Detection Approach for Academic Social Network: the Case of the Cross-Strait Academic Conference Network

With the fast development of information networks, academic social network analysis has attracted significant attention, we regard these researchers sharing common interests as a research community. The community has been widely used as the underlying structure of social networks. To utilize network information as much as possible, we capture the structural characteristics and attribute features to detect communities in the cross-strait academic conference network. In this paper, we first consider 2-hop neighbors with the Pareto principle to filtrate the central seed nodes in networks. Then we propose a new seed shrinkage strategy to get the initial communities and define the similarity according to the structure and attributes of social networks to merge the communities. Finally, we define a new indicator named inner average distance (IAD) to measure the aggregation density for each community. A case study of the cross-strait academic social network was developed to test the applicability of the proposed model, the experiment analysis suggests that our method can be more accurate to identify communities in most situations, which contributes to controlling the information spreading in networks.