Assessing scientific collaboration through coauthorship and content sharing

Over the past decade there have been many investigations aimed at defining the role of scientists and research groups in their coauthorship networks. Starting from the assumptions of network analysis, in this work we propose an analytical definition of a collaboration potential between authors of scientific papers based on both coauthorships and content sharing. The collaboration potential can also be considered a useful tool to investigate the relationships between a single scientist and research groups, thus allowing for the identification of characteristic “types” of scientists (integrated, independent, etc.). We computed the collaboration potential for a set of authors belonging to research groups of an institute specialized in the field of Medical Genetics. The methods presented in the paper are rather general as they can be applied to compute a collaboration potential for a network of cooperating actors in every situation in which one can qualify the content of some activities and which of them are in common among the actors of the network.