Analyzing Promising Researchers Using Network Centralities of Co-authorship Networks from Academic Literature

We propose a new way of using the betweenness centrality measure with co-author networks from an academic literature database to evaluate young researchers. It is difficult to discover and evaluate promising young researchers with indexes based on the number of cited papers, such as the h-index to which published papers introduce a lag and whose impact only becomes apparent after they have been cited by other papers. We validated the effectiveness of the measure as an index for evaluating young researchers. Our investigation of 1.92 million publications in the biological sciences shows that Research Fellows with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) have higher rankings and progress more quickly than other researchers. In addition, differences between JSPS Research Fellows and other researchers were observed at earlier stages using the proposed method than with the h-index and with centralities from literature published in the past 4 years. We expect that the proposed use of the betweenness centrality measure can be applied effectively to extract promising young researchers.