Predicting and recommending collaborations: An author-, institution-, and country-level analysis

This study examines collaboration dynamics with the goal to predict and recommend collaborations starting from the current topology. Author-, institution-, and country-level collaboration networks are constructed using a ten-year data set on library and information science publications. Different statistical approaches are applied to these collaboration networks. The study shows that, for the employed data set in particular, higher-level collaboration networks (i.e., country-level collaboration networks) tend to yield more accurate prediction outcomes than lower-level ones (i.e., institution- and author-level collaboration networks). Based on the recommended collaborations of the data set, this study finds that neighbor-information-based approaches are more clustered on a 2-D multidimensional scaling map than topology-based ones. Limitations of the applied approaches on sparse collaboration networks are also discussed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.