Institutional and country collaboration in an online service of scientific profiles: Google Scholar Citations

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and describe the topological properties of the institutional and national collaboration network from the profiles extracted from Google Scholar Citations (GSC). 19,912 unique profiles with “co-authors” were obtained from a web crawl performed in March 2012. Several statistical and network analysis techniques were used to map and analyse these collaboration relationships at the country and institution level. Results show that The United States dominates the world scientific map and that every research institution is grouped by national, geographical and cultural criteria. A clustering phenomenon based on the self-similarity and fractal properties of scale-free networks is also observed. We conclude that GSC is a suitable tool for collaboration studies only at macro level between countries and institutions.

► A clustering phenomenon based on self-similarity of scale-free networks is suggested.
► United States dominates the world scientific map according to collaboration.
► Research institutions are grouped by national, geographical and cultural criteria.
► Local collaboration grows against international one according to number of profiles.
► GSC is a suitable tool for collaboration studies at country and institutional level.