When disasters strike environmental science: a case–control study of changes in scientific collaboration networks

Abstract

Studies of scientific collaboration networks reveal the social structure of scientific disciplines. Most of these studies assume scientists work under conditions of institutional stability. What happens to science when disaster strikes and research practice is disrupted? This study examines structural changes in a scientific collaboration network after serial exposure to major disasters. We analyze the collaboration network of wetlands scientists publishing research related to the marshes of the Louisiana Gulf Coast between 1996 and 2015, along with a control network from a wetlands setting in a different geographic area that did not experience any disasters over the same time span. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (2005) and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) offer the opportunity to compare the Gulf wetlands collaboration network before and after the disasters. Results indicate changes in size, research activity, and connectivity in periods following the major hurricanes and oil spill.

One-year in: COVID-19 research at the international level in CORD-19 data

“…Fig 9 shows the COVID-19 collaborative network, where, as expected based upon research by Rotolo & Frickel [ 11 ], we observe more clusters and more brokering hubs than pre-COVID-19. The number of clusters has grown, with four clusters revealing a broader set of countries acting as centralized nodes or hubs, with the UK, Italy, and Germany increasing their bridging role from positions shown in the pre-COVID-19 network.…”

“…That said, because of travel limitations and a need for urgent results, we expect the rate of international collaboration and network ties to remain lower than pre-pandemic levels. This expectation is also informed by the research of Rotolo and Frickel [ 11 ] who found that there were fewer ties and smaller teams among researchers just after a hurricane disaster. Further, based upon findings in the wake of the Fukushima disaster [ 12 ] and a survey by Myers et al [ 2 ] we expect that attention to pandemic-related R&D (including basic science, patient care, and public health) has lessened the output of other scientific research as well as reduced the rate of international collaborations in other fields.…”

Structural stability of the evolving developer collaboration network in the OSS community

“…Many studies analysing the structural stability of networks have been conducted in different fields, such as transportation networks [18,19], scientific collaboration networks [20,21], and biological networks [22]. For example, Li et al proposed a new metric (i.e., Markov criticality) to analyse the vulnerability of networks and verified its effectiveness in nine real-world networks [23].…”