Scientific Information Research
Keywords
distinguished scientists, Nobel Laureates, scientific cooperation networks, strong ties, super ties
Abstract
[Purpose/significance]Scientific cooperation has become an important feature to promote scientific and tech⁃nological breakthroughs and original innovation. Exploring the laws and patterns of scientific cooperation among distinguished scientists can help provide decision-making references for the country to cultivate leading talents and establish high-performance teams. [Method/process]In this paper, we take 145 Nobel Prize winners in natural sciences from 1990 to 2010 as research objects, identify the strong and super relationships in their scientific cooperation and construct their cooperation networks. It further applies social network analysis and network recursive decomposition to analyse the quantitative characteristics of strong and super-relationships of Nobel Laureates and their impact on scientific research performance, and to investigate whether there are structural changes in the strong and super-relationships networks before and after the award. [Result/conclusion]It is found that 99% of Nobel Laureates have strong relationship partners and 82% have super relationship partners, and the stability and durability of super relationships are higher than those of strong relationships. Strong relationship cooperation is usually carried out in the form of a team of 3-4 people; super relationship cooperation has a higher information transfer efficiency between members, and the cooperation relationship is closer, mainly in the form of two-by-two cooperation. An increase in the number of strong and super-relationships in a collaborative network can promote the productivity of outstanding scientists, but has no significant effect on the quantity of their first-authored publications; excessively high network density can inhibit scientific productivity. In addition, it was found that the number of entries and exits of members in strong-relationship co-operative networks produced significant structural changes after the award, but this phenomenon was not found in super-relationship co-operative networks.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.19809/j.cnki.kjqbyj.2025.02.004
Recommended Citation
LIU, Junwan; ZHANG, Rui; and SUI, Hongzhe
(2025)
"Analysis of Collaborative Networks of Distinguished Scientists Based on Strong and Super Relationships：A Case Study of Nobel Prize Winners,"
Scientific Information Research: Vol. 7:
Iss.
2, Article 4.
DOI: 10.19809/j.cnki.kjqbyj.2025.02.004
Available at:
https://eng.kjqbyj.com/journal/vol7/iss2/4