Collaboration networks of levantine biomedical researchers

Social networks and social network analysis are one of the hottest topics in Academia as well as in the industry nowadays. A collaboration (or a co-authorship) network, is a type of social networks in which the actors are scholars and researchers and a tie between two actors represents the fact that they have co-authored at least one paper together. The objective of this work is to study scientific collaborations patterns in order to construct and analyze a collaboration network of authors in the Levant region. The focus is on publications in the biomedical field. Even though collaboration networks have been constructed for several fields and in different regions, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in general is still largely understudied, to the best of our knowledge. Constructing the network is challenging due to many reasons including the lack of sufficient data. Analyzing the constructed network reveal that there is an increase in both biomedical researchers and published papers that matches the spur of growth that the Levant-based academic institutions enjoyed in the early 2000s. Among many things, the analysis reveal that local researchers are shifting from working individually or with non-local collaborators to working within relatively large groups of local collaborators.