Patterns of collaboration in four scientific disciplines of the Turkish collaboration network

Scientific collaboration networks, as a prototype of complex evolving networks, are studied in many aspects of their structure and evolving characteristics. The organizing principles of these networks also vary in different scientific disciplines, demonstrating that each discipline has specific connecting rules. Retrieving the co-authorship data from the ISI Web of Science, we constructed networks of four disciplines (engineering, mathematics, physics and surgery) as a subset of the Turkish scientific collaboration network spanning 33 years’ data. To provide a comparative perspective on the network topologies, we studied some statistical and topological properties such as the number of authors, degree distributions, authors per paper and papers per author histograms and distributions. These properties yield that the rapid growth of high education in Turkey (i.e. doubling of the number of universities and students within the last decade) had boosted the number of publications and increased the level of collaborations in the scientific collaboration networks. We showed the occurrence of Matthew effect in career longevity distributions, and also outlined the Heaps’ law relation in the scaling of the collaborations as well. We outlined the prominent properties of each subset, while the similarities and deviations from the interdisciplinary networks are also evaluated.