On social computing research collaboration patterns: a social network perspective

The field of social computing emerged more than ten years ago. During the last decade, researchers from a variety of disciplines have been closely collaborating to boost the growth of social computing research. This paper aims at identifying key researchers and institutions, and examining the collaboration patterns in the field. We employ co-authorship network analysis at different levels to study the bibliographic information of 6 543 publications in social computing from 1998 to 2011. This paper gives a snapshot of the current research in social computing and can provide an initial guidance to new researchers in social computing.