A Vietnamese co-authorship network in social sciences: some graphical presentation of 2008-2017 Scopus data

The application of social network analysis in studying science collaboration has not been used for studying science activities in Vietnam although collaboration is popular among Vietnamese scientists. This paper employs network visualization together with basic network measures to explore characteristics of the network of 412 Vietnamese social scientists whose papers can be found indexed in the Scopus database. Early results show that the network’s connections are very sparse, with only 0.52% density, but the clustering coefficient is very high, 58.64%, suggesting that the dissemination of scientific knowledge and expertise in the network is not very efficient. Secondly, the disparity in the levels of connection among individual researchers in the network indicates that it would easily fall apart if a few highly-connected nodes are removed. Finally, upon zooming in on the two largest components of the network, the study found that their characteristics differ from the whole and both of them are led by the most productive researchers who also have the most connections.