Exploring the role and nature of interactions between Institutes in a Local Affiliation Network

Abstract: In this work, we have studied the collaboration and citation network between Indian Institutes from publications in American Physical Society(APS) journals between 1970-2013. We investigate the role of geographic proximity on the network structure and find that it is the characteristics of the Institution, rather than the geographic distance, that plays a dominant role in collaboration networks. We find that Institutions with better federal funding dominate the network topology and play a crucial role in overall research output. We find that the citation flow across different categories of institutions is strongly linked to the collaborations between them. We have estimated the knowledge flow in and out of Institutions and identified the top knowledge source and sinks.