Identifying research facilitators in an emerging Asian Research Area

We introduce a novel set of metrics for triadic closure among individuals or groups to model how co-authorship networks become more integrated over time. We call this process of triadic, third-party mediated integration, research facilitation. We apply our research facilitation or RF-metrics to the development of the Pan-Asian SNP (PASNP) Consortium, the first inter-Asian genomics network. Our aim was to examine if the consortium catalyzed research facilitation or integration among the members and the wider region. The PASNP Consortium is an ideal case study of an emerging Asian Research Area because its members themselves asserted a regional Asian identity. To validate our model, we developed data mining software to extract and match full author and institutional information from the PDFs of scientific papers.