Analysis of co-authorship patterns at the individual level

Resumen

Publication activity, citation impact and communication patterns, in general, change in the course of a scientist’s career. Mobility
and radical changes in a scientist’s research environment or profile are among the most spectacular factors that have effect on
individual collaboration patterns. Although bibliometrics at this level should be applied with the utmost care, characteristic patterns
of an individual scientist’s research collaboration and changes in these in the course of a career can be well depicted using
bibliometric methods. A wide variety of indicators and network tools are chosen to follow up the evolution and to visualise and to
quantify collaboration and performance profiles of individual researchers. These methods are, however, designed to supplement
expert-opinion based assessment and other qualitative assessments, and should not be used as stand-alone evaluation
tools. This study presents part of the results published in an earlier study by Zhang and Glänzel (2012)4 as well as new applications of these methods.