Scientific Collaboration Networks Among Researchers and Social Network Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review

Scientific collaboration networks as a research area have been the focus of the scientific community for years, across various disciplines and subjects, including health-medicine, economics, engineering, social sciences, environment, technology, and many more. In this systematic literature review, scientific collaboration networks have been examined using social networking analysis, focusing on data extracted from Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink, resulting in 348 articles, published from 1984 onwards. This review attempts to answer three research questions: 1) how research on scientific collaboration networks has evolved throughout the years, 2) what the focus of the literature on scientific collaboration networks is and, 3) how Social Network Analysis has been used in the context of scientific collaboration network studies. The study revealed a surge in publications, mainly from 2016 onwards, with most of the articles focusing on health-medicine, technology, and environmental issues. By examining authors, institutions, universities, countries, and citations, this review seeks to reveal new trends, collaboration, structural patterns, influential actors, and dynamics of the field. Social networking analysis is combined with many other methodologies and techniques, like network construction, descriptive analysis, statistics, longitudinal analysis, Machine Learning and AI, and community detection, revealing research gaps, like the need for interdisciplinarity and international scientific collaboration, gender-based and peripheral actors’ studies. Finally, this review underlines the potential for studying scientific collaboration networks in regions with less representation.