Collaboration and scientific production: an analysis of the Medicine co-authorship network in Colombia

Abstract

Objective: To analyze the co-authorship network in medicine in Colombia between 2012 and 2022, in order to identify the most central authors and understand the role they play in the scientific collaboration network in
this field.

Methods: A descriptive, exploratory, and retrospective study was carried out on 23,549 articles indexed in
Scopus, with at least one author affiliated with a Colombian institution. Single-authored articles were excluded, and the analysis focused on publications with between 2 and 29 authors. The database was processed in RStudio, and network centrality metrics were calculated in Gephi. Subsequently, centrality measures, such as
betweenness, closeness, degree, and eigenvector, were applied, selecting the 25 most relevant authors in
each metric (Top-25).
Results: Five authors were identified as appearing in three of the four centrality metrics applied, which
evidences their prominent role within the network. The findings confirm that collaboration, rather than the
individual volume of publications, provides a better understanding of the strategic positions of authors in the
collective generation of knowledge.
Conclusions: The results show that scientific collaboration enhances productivity and efficiently connects the
actors in the network, configuring “small world” type structures where the relationships between similar authors
strengthen the collective generation of knowledge. This allows us to reflect on new rules in scientific
communication, where the co-authorship network becomes as relevant an indicator as the number of individual
publications.