DIRECCIÓN DE INSTALACIONES

Publications

Isabelle Linden and M´elanie Motte

University of Namur, Department of Business Administration 8, Rempart de la Vierge, 5000 Namur, Belgium [email protected],[email protected],

WWW home page: http://unamur.be/~ilinden

Abstract. In the last decades, scientific collaboration analysis has ben-efited of improvements in techniques and tools that support networks analysis. Taking advantage of these opportunities, the Euro Working Group on Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS) launched the Collab-Net project. This project aims at analysing the life of the group. Emerged as an autonomous parallel thread within the project, the work reported in this paper studies the publications generated by the activity of the group for the decade 2003-2012.

The analyses reported here apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) tech-niques to explore two axes. The first one studies the co-authors’ network and studies authors’ involvement and their positions within this network.

The second one examines the keywords associated to these publications and, considering the network of their co-occurrences, proposes some ele-ments about the domain covered by the selected set of publications.

Key words: EWG-DSS, SNA, co-authorship, keywords

1 Introduction

For several years, the Euro Working Group on Decision Support Systems is interested in the evolution of the network formed by its members. The project, launched to follow and analyse the community, is known as the EWG-DSS Collab-Net Project. The first results have been published in several pa-pers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. They particularly highlighted the leadership position of some of the early members among which the committee members. Moreover, these last ones are acting as efficient bridges within the community. The roadmap for the future of the project is drawn in [9].

Taken an alternative path with respect to this agenda the present piece of work studies the network through the set of publications issued from the events organised by the group. Indeed, since the creation of the EWG-DSS in 1989 several events have been organised. Together with the committee meetings and streams in the EURO conference organized since the early years, the group proposes now workshops and tracks in mini-conferences. Moreover, these events

2 I. Linden and M. Motte

do not only give rise to proceedings but also, extended versions of selected best papers are published in special issues of journals and in books.

With respect to the original program, this restricted set of publications pro-vides a limited view on the real activity of the members. Therefore, the project is still running and a platform to support a sound data collection process is un-der development. However, focussing this piece of work on events and editions managed by the group offers interesting aspects:

1. the data collection is complete and does not suffer methodological discussion;

2. moreover, the available information involves not only title and authors but also keywords and abstracts;

3. the study enhances the part of the activity of the members whose association with the group is obvious.

The paper is structured as follows. After a few words on the data collection and the methodology, similar works applied to other communities are briefly mentioned. Then, the results obtained using the social network analysis (SNA) techniques are described in two sections that cover the two main axes of the analysis. The first one studies relations between the authors in the network. The second axis is dedicated to the keywords analysis and identifies the main areas in the domain covered by the publications. The last section draws some conclusion and lines for future work.

2 Methodology

2.1 Data Collection

The data collected for this work cover 10 years of activities of the EWG-DSS from 2003 to 2012. They consist of

– streams in 4 EURO conferences (Prague 2007, Bonn 2009, Lisbon 2010 and Vilnius 2012)

– 4 (co)-organised workshops (Graz 2005, Paris 2011, London 2011 and Liver-pool 2012),

– the co-organized International Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Decision Making and Decision Support (CIDMDS London 2006)

– the co-organized International Conference on Collaborative Decision Making (CDM Toulouse 2008)

Moreover, 10 journal special issues (IJDSST [14, 16, 17, 18] GDN [15], EJOR [10, 13] CEJOR [12] and JDS [9, 11] and one book [19] involve extended versions of selected best papers.

The choice of the initial year of 2003 corresponds to the first edition of a special issue [9] by the group and initiated a period of significant activity as confirmed by the list above. Limiting the period to 10 years (2003-2012) offered

EWG-DSS publications SNA 3 2.2 Data Preparation

Thanks to the support of the EWG-DSS committee, obtaining complete infor-mation was not such a big deal. Even if complete, the data set still required some pre-treatment. The classical disambiguation and synonyms identification in the authors’ name required some attention; but given the limited size of the data set (less than 300 publications), it was efficiently managed by hand.

Regarding the keywords, the job was a bit more demanding. Indeed, the chosen approach consisted in respecting authors’ choices and use the author-defined keywords. However, this does not completely avoid some pre-treatment.

In a first step, the identification of synonyms required a bit of care (consider f.ex.

MCDA, Multicriteria Decision Analysis, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and all the variation with or without capital letters, among others). Complementarily with this cleaning, some very specific keywords have been completed with a more generic one. For example, “k-means range clustering” appear as such for only one paper and so get lost in the ocean of the keywords. Addition to the concerned paper, of “clustering” and “data-mining” improves the quality of the networks in two ways: on the one hand the specific keywords turn to be connected with the network, on the other hand, the more generic term “data-mining”

receive relevant connections. This tactful association of keywords has been done following recommendations of the committee members of the EWG-DSS.

2.3 Statistical an SNA Methods

The summary of three large networks studies realised in [21] present and com-pare co-author network in biology, physics and mathematics. The sizes of these networks (several 10.000 and more) do not allow comparison with our piece of work, but the relevance and the interpretation of observed parameters adopt a similar methodology.

In [22], authors apply social network analysis techniques to the co-author network extracted from the publication in the journal Scientometrics from 1978 to 2004, they firstly compute global metrics on the network to describe the micro-structured of the collaboration network, then they provide a description of the identified clusters on the basis of the most frequent words appearing in the co-authored titles. In this cluster analysis, the network is limited to authors involved in at least 3 publications. The current piece of work adopts a similar microstructure approach of the co-authorship analysis. But regarding topics, we choose a global view and focussed on keywords instead of titles.

Words’ occurrence in title is also used by [23] that studies the evolution of communities in publications inventoried on DBLP, the authors propose a methodology to follow the temporal evolution of communities defined by common interest.

4 I. Linden and M. Motte