Over-time measurement of triadic closure in coauthorship networks

• Published in: Social network analysis and mining Vol. 7; no. 1; p. 9
• Main Authors: Kim, Jinseok, Diesner, Jana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vienna Springer Vienna 01.12.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Applications of Graph Theory and Complex Networks; Co authorship; Collaboration; Computer Science; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Economics; Game Theory; Humanities; Law; Lower bounds; Mathematics; Measurement; Measures; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Networks; Neurosciences; Original Article; Physics; Rates; Social and Behav. Sciences; Sociology; Statistics for Social Sciences; Time measurement; Upper bounds; Turkey; Slovenia; Triadic closure; Clustering coefficient; Coauthorship networks; Transitivity
• ISSN: 1869-5450; 1869-5469
• DOI: 10.1007/s13278-017-0428-3

Applying the concept of triadic closure to coauthorship networks means that scholars are likely to publish a joint paper if they have previously coauthored with the same people. Prior research has identified moderate to high (20 to 40%) closure rates; suggesting this mechanism is a reasonable explanation for tie formation between future coauthors. We show how calculating triadic closure based on prior operationalizations of closure, namely Newman’s measure for one-mode networks (NCC) and Opsahl’s measure for two-mode networks (OCC) may lead to higher amounts of closure compared to measuring closure over time via a metric that we introduce and test in this paper. Based on empirical experiments using four large-scale, longitudinal datasets, we find a lower bound of 1–3% closure rates and an upper bound of 4–7%. These results motivate research on new explanatory factors for the formation of coauthorship links.