Team Recognition in Big Scholarly Data: Exploring Collaboration Intensity

The scale of scholarly data has been expanded due to the fact that scientific productions are increasing rapidly and new scholars affiliate academia incessantly. Scholars are shifting their research patterns from individual research to academic teamwork due to the complexity of scientific issues. In order to achieve higher reputations and better performance, academic teams with leaders are constructed to speed up knowledge sharing and problem solving. It is significant to explore team-based issues with the increasing interests of information exploration in big scholarly data. However, existing academic team definitions are commonly not quantitative, which makes it difficult to identify real academic teams. In this work, we propose a collaboration relationship evaluation index called Collaboration Intensity Index (CII), which is a two-way and quantitative index to evaluate collaboration intensity between two scholars in the network. Then, we construct a new type of co-author network with edges weighted by CII, which differs from the original co-author networks. This network reflects the newly scientific research patterns inside or outside academic teams. Furthermore, we propose TRAC (Team Recognition Algorithm based on CII) to identify academic teams from large co-author networks. Finally, we use DBLP data set, which contains 1,250,440 scholars and 1,575,949 published papers, to identify teams by TRAC. Comparing with fast unfolding algorithm and real team data, the effectiveness of our method can be demonstrated.