Visualizing and evaluating the growth of multi-institutional collaboration based on research network analysis

AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc. 2014 Apr 7:2014:60-6. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Research collaboration plays an important role in scientific productivity and academic innovation. Multi-institutional collaboration has become a vital approach for integrating multidisciplinary resources and expertise to enhance biomedical research. There is an increasing need for analyzing the effect of multi-institutional research collaboration. In this paper, we present a collaboration analysis pipeline based on research networks constructed from publication co-authorship relationship. Such research networks can be effectively used to render and analyze large-scale institutional collaboration. The co-authorship networks of the Cleveland Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC) were visualized and analyzed. SciVal Expert™ was used to extract publication data of the CTSC members. The network was presented in informative and aesthetically appealing diagrams using the open source visualization package Gephi. The analytic result demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, and it also indicates the substantial growth of research collaboration among the CTSC members crossing its partner institutions.