Marcell Nagy

Roland Molontay, Marcell Nagy

Two decades ago three pioneering papers turned the attention to complex networks and initiated a new era of research, establishing an interdisciplinary field called network science. Namely, these highly-cited seminal papers were written by Watts&Strogatz, Barabási&Albert, and Girvan&Newman on small-world networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex networks, respectively. In the past 20 years - due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field - a diverse but not divided network science community has emerged. In this paper, we investigate how this community has evolved over time with respect to speed, diversity and interdisciplinary nature as seen through the growing co-authorship network of network scientists (here the notion refers to a scholar with at least one paper citing at least one of the three aforementioned milestone papers). After providing a bibliographic analysis of 31,763 network science papers, we construct the co-authorship network of 56,646 network scientists and we analyze its topology and dynamics. We shed light on the collaboration patterns of the last 20 years of network science by investigating numerous structural properties of the co-authorship network and by using enhanced data visualization techniques. We also identify the most central authors, the largest communities, investigate the spatiotemporal changes, and compare the properties of the network to scientometric indicators.

Roland Molontay, Marcell Nagy

Complex networks have attracted a great deal of research interest in the last two decades since Watts & Strogatz, Barabási & Albert and Girvan & Newman published their highly-cited seminal papers on small-world networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex networks, respectively. These fundamental papers initiated a new era of research establishing an interdisciplinary field called network science. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field, a diverse but not divided network science community has emerged in the past 20 years. This paper honors the contributions of network science by exploring the evolution of this community as seen through the growing co-authorship network of network scientists (here the notion refers to a scholar with at least one paper citing at least one of the three aforementioned milestone papers). After investigating various characteristics of 29,528 network science papers, we construct the co-authorship network of 52,406 network scientists and we analyze its topology and dynamics. We shed light on the collaboration patterns of the last 20 years of network science by investigating numerous structural properties of the co-authorship network and by using enhanced data visualization techniques. We also identify the most central authors, the largest communities, investigate the spatiotemporal changes, and compare the properties of the network to scientometric indicators.

Marcell Nagy, Roland Molontay

Data-driven analysis of complex networks has been in the focus of research for decades. An important area of research is to study how well real networks can be described with a small selection of metrics, furthermore how well network models can capture the relations between graph metrics observed in real networks. In this paper, we apply machine learning techniques to investigate the aforementioned problems. We study 500 real-world networks along with 2,000 synthetic networks generated by four frequently used network models with previously calibrated parameters to make the generated graphs as similar to the real networks as possible. This paper unifies several branches of data-driven complex network analysis, such as the study of graph metrics and their pair-wise relationships, network similarity estimation, model calibration, and graph classification. We find that the correlation profiles of the structural measures significantly differ across network domains and the domain can be efficiently determined using a small selection of graph metrics. The structural properties of the network models with fixed parameters are robust enough to perform parameter calibration. The goodness-of-fit of the network models highly depends on the network domain. By solving classification problems, we find that the models lack the capability of generating a graph with a high clustering coefficient and relatively large diameter simultaneously. On the other hand, models are able to capture exactly the degree-distribution-related metrics.