On interdisciplinary collaborations in scientific coauthorship networks: the case of the Brazilian community

Interdisciplinary collaborations have recently drawn the attention of scholars, since bridging academic relationships contributes to make scientific coauthorship networks stronger. However, previous studies have focused on characterizing specific groups rather than on studying a complete and robust scientific community. In this article, instead of analyzing particular scenarios, we characterize these collaborations with respect to the Brazilian scientific communities defined according to the upper level of a knowledge area classification scheme. For this, we collected data from the Lattes Platform, an internationally renowned initiative from CNPq, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, that provides a repository of Brazilian researchers’ curricula vitae and research groups, all integrated into a single system. Our results show that the Brazilian coauthorship network grew and became especially interdisciplinary, with 35.2% of all collaborations being interdisciplinary and 57.6% of the researchers having participated in at least one interdisciplinary collaboration. We also investigate the intensity of these interdisciplinary collaborations across distinct communities. Finally, we explore a temporal view of the researchers’ career, thus identifying distinct collaboration patterns involving the aforementioned scientific communities.