Bowling together: scientific collaboration networks of European demographers

Raya Muttarak, Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU)
Guy J. Abel, Asian Demographic Research Institute
Valeria Bordone, University of Southampton
Emilio Zagheni, University of Washington, Seattle

Employing a unique database of metadata for papers presented at the European Population Conferences (EPC) for the years 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014, this article explores development of research in population studies as well as trends and patterns of scientific collaboration networks among demographers. The data are organised in a panel format whereby each author, institution and country are linked across the five conferences. Using the package ‘gender’ in R, which encodes gender based on names and dates of birth using a variety of data sets suitable for different geographical regions, we are able to identify gender from names. This allows us to perform analysis of collaboration networks by gender. We find that the size of the EPCs as measured by the number of papers presented and the number of authors has grown overtime. The top ten countries with the highest number of authors appeared in the EPCs are predominantly located in Western Europe with the United States having the highest number of authors followed by Italy and Great Britain. In terms of collaboration outside one's own country, the United States and Austria represent a fairly high rate of international collaboration with about a half of the papers presented involved at least one co-author from overseas. Using word clouds to visualize words that appear most frequently in the paper’s titles, we find that fertility and family dominate the research agenda including in subfield like data and methods and history, development and environment.