Decomposing social and semantic networks in emerging “big data” research

•This study conducts a social network analysis of international co-authorship relationships in “big data” science and analyzes semantic networks.•The results indicate that the U.S. was the most central country, followed by Germany, the U.K., and France, in that order.•Some European countries engaged in international collaboration to an extent greater than expected.

This paper examines the structural patterns of networks of internationally co-authored SCI papers in the domain of research driven by big data and provides an empirical analysis of semantic patterns of paper titles. The results based on data collected from the DVD version of the 2011 SCI database identify the U.S. as the most central country, followed by the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain, in that order. However, some countries (e.g., Portugal) with low degree centrality occupied relatively central positions in terms of betweenness centrality. The results of the semantic network analysis suggest that internationally co-authored papers tend to focus on primary technologies, particularly in terms of programming and related database issues. The results show that a combination of words and locations can provide a richer representation of an emerging field of science than the sum of the two separate representations.