Modes of Collaboration in Modern Science - Beyond Power Laws and Preferential Attachment

Abstract: The goal of the study is to determine the underlying processes leading to the observed collaborator distribution in modern scientific fields, with special attention to non-power law behavior. Nanoscience is used as a case study of a modern interdisciplinary field, and its coauthorship network for 2000-04 period is constructed from NanoBank database. We find three collaboration modes that correspond to three distinct ranges in the distribution of collaborators: (1) for authors with fewer than 20 collaborators (the majority) preferential attachment does not hold and they form a log-normal "hook" instead of a power law, (2) authors with more than 20 collaborators benefit from preferential attachment and form a power law tail, and (3) authors with between 250 and 800 collaborators are more frequent than expected because of the hyperauthorship practices in certain subfields.