Author(s)

Maria Teresinha Tamanini Andrade, Patrícia Braga, Tereza Kelly Gomes Carneiro, Núbia Moura Ribeiro, Marcelo A. Moret, Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira

Instituto Federal de Educa??o Ciência e Tecnologia, Sim?es Filho, Brazil.
Programa de Modelagem Computacional, SENAI Cimatec, Salvador, Brazil.
Programa de Modelagem Computacional, SENAI Cimatec, Salvador, Brazil; Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
Programa de Modelagem Computacional, SENAI Cimatec, Salvador, Brazil; Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Brazil.
Universidade Estadual de Ciências da Saúde de Alagoas, Maceió, Brazil.

Currently, the collaboration in scientific communities has been studied in order to explain, among other things, the knowledge diffusion. The quality of Graduate Programmes is often associated with the scientific collaboration. This paper discusses how scientific collaboration processes can be identified and characterized through social and complex networks. For this purpose, collaboration networks of bibliographic production, research projects, and committees of PhD theses and Masters’ dissertations by researchers from a graduate program in computational modeling were studied. The data were obtained from CAPES’ reports of the period from 2001 to 2009. Among the studied indices, centrality indices indicate the presence of prominent researchers who influence others and promptly interact with other researchers in the network. The indices of complex networks reveal the presence of the small-world (i.e. these networks are favorable to increase coordination between researchers) phenomenon and indicate a behavior of scale-free degree distribution (i.e. some researchers promote clustering more than others) for one of the studied networks.

Knowledge Production and Dissemination; Collaboration; Scientific Communities; Network Theory; Social Networks; Complex Networks

Tamanini Andrade, M. , Braga, P. , Gomes Carneiro, T. , Moura Ribeiro, N. , A. Moret, M. and de Barros Pereira, H. (2014) Contextualized Analysis of Social Networks: Collaboration in Scientific Communities. Social Networking, 3, 71-79. doi: 10.4236/sn.2014.32009.