"We investigate the structure of scientific collaboration networks. We consider two scientists to be connected if they have authored a paper together, and construct explicit networks of such connections using data drawn from a number of databases... We show that these collaboration networks form "small worlds" in which randomly chosen pairs of scientists are typically separated by only a short path of intermediate acquaintances. We further give results for mean and distribution of numbers of collaborators of authors, demonstrate the presence of clustering in the networks, and highlight a number of apparent differences in the patterns of collaboration between the fields studied."
"Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and affiliated Professor of Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science, and Communication at Stanford University."
"The aim is to relate all types of information in a network model made up of nodes, where each node is one datum of arbitrary type/size, and links, where each link describes a direct relationship between two nodes."