Overlapping Community Structure in Co-authorship Networks: A Case Study

Malek Jebabli (1) , Hocine Cherifi (1) , Chantal Cherifi (2) , Atef Hamouda (3)

1 Le2i - Laboratoire Electronique, Informatique et Image [UMR6306]
2 DISP - Décision et Information pour les Systèmes de Production
3 UTM - Université de Tunis El Manar

Community structure is one of the key properties of real-world complex networks. It plays a crucial role in their behaviors and topology. While an important work has been done on the issue of community detection, very little attention has been devoted to the analysis of the community structure. In this paper, we present an extensive investigation of the overlapping community network deduced from a large-scale co-authorship network. The nodes of the overlapping community network represent the functional communities of the co-authorship network, and the links account for the fact that communities share some nodes in the co-authorship network. The comparative evaluation of the topological properties of these two networks shows that they share similar topological properties. These results are very interesting. Indeed, the network of communities seems to be a good representative of the original co-authorship network. With its smaller size, it may be more practical in order to realize various analyses that cannot be performed easily in large-scale real-world networks.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Malek Jebabli, Hocine Cherifi, Chantal Cherifi, Atef Hamouda. Overlapping Community Structure in Co-authorship Networks: A Case Study. 7th IEEE International Conference on u- and e- Service, Science and Technology (UNESST 2014), Dec 2014, Hainan, China. pp.26 - 29, ⟨10.1109/UNESST.2014.11⟩. ⟨hal-01534503⟩