Detecting Collaborative Fields Using Social Networks

It is generally difficult for researchers to obtain information related to their own fields and novel technologies from huge data residing in the World Wide Web. Furthermore, they often try to apply them to other particular fields which are different from theirs. The main motivation of this phenomenon is to solve existing problems or improve the performance of their systems. Hence, it is important to detect collaborative fields in which technologies of particular fields are applied to another area to find various trends. In this paper, we propose a method to detect collaborative fields by using social networks representing the relations among authors of papers, and describe some experimental results to show the effectiveness of the proposed method when collaborative fields are detected by using social networks.