As I have dived deep into the world of college access research over the last couple of months, I've noticed many researchers appear again and again across various higher ed topics (such as financial aid, college choice, and completion) with co-authors from different universities and across many different academic departments.
I thought it would be cool to see how these researchers are all connected; since even though 2nd or 3rd degree connections didn't directly work together, their ideas and co-author experiences were shared somewhat. And I hoped to identify some great researchers/universities doing some kick-ass work.
Above is that initial network graph of paper co-authors. Ideally I'd do this with citations but co-authors was an easier start. This shows which researchers published papers with one another. The bigger, bolder researchers are more connected across disciplines and topics.
Here's the basic process I used:
- copy-paste from Google Scholar into Excel
- clean the data through formatting formulas (about 3400 papers)
- narrow down papers by title, keeping only those related to higher ed (about 1000 papers)
- format co-authors (nodes) to establish separate connections (edges) for each shared paper
- create a simple Gephi graph (this was my first one)
- cluster/organize the layout by Force Atlas
- filter out authors with less than 3 connections (it cleaned it up nicely)
- size the nodes by betweeness centrality
- partition and color the nodes by modularity class