Twenty Years of Network Science: A Bibliographic and Co-Authorship Network Analysis

Two decades ago three pioneering papers turned the attention to complex networks and initiated a new era of research, establishing an interdisciplinary field called network science. Namely, these highly-cited seminal papers were written by Watts&Strogatz, Barabási&Albert, and Girvan&Newman on small-world networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex networks, respectively. In the past 20 years - due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field - a diverse but not divided network science community has emerged. In this paper, we investigate how this community has evolved over time with respect to speed, diversity and interdisciplinary nature as seen through the growing co-authorship network of network scientists (here the notion refers to a scholar with at least one paper citing at least one of the three aforementioned milestone papers). After providing a bibliographic analysis of 31,763 network science papers, we construct the co-authorship network of 56,646 network scientists and we analyze its topology and dynamics. We shed light on the collaboration patterns of the last 20 years of network science by investigating numerous structural properties of the co-authorship network and by using enhanced data visualization techniques. We also identify the most central authors, the largest communities, investigate the spatiotemporal changes, and compare the properties of the network to scientometric indicators.