Ranking in Collaboration Networks Using a Relationship Intensity Metric

Collaboration networks are social networks in which relationships represent some kind of professional collaboration. The study of collaboration networks can help identify members that are important or influential within a given community. This work is divided into two parts. The first part is a study of the topological properties of two collaboration networks: the global collaboration network and the Brazilian collaboration network of authors of scientific papers within the area of Computer Science. The second part presents a ranking metric for vertices based on the intensities of their relationships. Using the proposed metric and other more classical metrics, we rank the researchers in Brazil in Computer Science. The proposed metric was compared with subjective evaluation of researchers made by CNPq. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed metric in identifying influential researchers when compared to another metrics in the literature.