HIERARCHICAL AUTHOR NETWORKS - AN ANALYSIS OF EUROPEAN MOLECULAR-BIOLOGY LABORATORY (EMBL) PUBLICATIONS

Go-authorship analyses are both difficult to perform and interpret. We have devised a new way of calculating and representing hierarchical a uthor networks that depict relationships among authors in a more exhau stive and less equivocal manner than most available automatic analyses . Any structure, however complex, can be broken down into independent subclusters of authors that can be represented as individual interconn ected networks. We illustrate our approach by analysing the authors of publications giving the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) as an affiliation in 1994 (from the ISI 1994 CD-ROM). The networks can be interpreted by referring to the official EMBL staff list (Annual R eport 1993) and, in terms of research topics, by consulting the articl e titles and abstracts. In this respect, correspondence analyses of th e author-publication matrices - that are the counterparts of the autho r-author matrices - prove extremely useful in structuring the thematic information. In fact, both methods - the hierarchical author networks and the correspondence analysis biplots - mutually enrich each other and provide a global picture of the inherent structure and interests o f the EMBL as given by their 1994 publications.