Identifying Key Players in Research Networks: Betweenness Centrality Holds the Key
The article analyzes key authors in research collaboration networks using social network analysis metrics. By creating a network of authors and their co-authors, the researchers identified key authors based on centrality measures like degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. Comparing the results of these measures in the Maximum Spanning Tree network and the original network, they found that betweenness centrality was the most useful in identifying key authors.