Graph Analysis of Citation and Co-authorship Networks of Egyptian Authors

TL;DR

This study builds a directed citation and undirected co-authorship graph for publications by Egyptian-affiliated authors, assembled by combining Google Scholar scraping with the Semantic Scholar API into the AlGoNet dataset of 31,508 papers and 320,969 citations. It applies NetworkX-based analyses to uncover temporal trends, degree and eigenvector centrality, clustering, density, and strongly connected components, revealing a heavy-tailed degree distribution with a few highly influential papers and a predominantly sparse network. It also analyzes co-authorship patterns, identifying top collaborators and 286 author communities, including one very large collaboration, illustrating both fragmentation and consolidation in Egyptian scholarship. The findings offer actionable insights for researchers and policymakers on scholarly influence, collaboration opportunities, and potential avenues for fostering Egyptian research ecosystems, supported by a robust, public-facing dataset and methods. The degree distribution follows a power law $P(x) = C x^{-\alpha}$ with $ ext{alpha} \approx 1.726$ in the main network, underscoring the long-tail nature of academic impact in this corpus.

Abstract

The current research conducts a comprehensive analysis of citation networks focusing on publications by authors affiliated with Egyptian institutions. Leveraging the Semantic Scholar platform and its API, a citation network and a co-authorship network graphs are constructed to visualize the interconnections among these publications and their authors. This is done using the Python package for graph analysis (Networkx). The primary objective is to identify influential Egyptian publications and assess the centrality of nodes within the citation network. Through meticulous data collection including web scraping techniques, we obtained a cleaned dataset comprising publications by authors affiliated with Egyptian institutions. The analysis addresses challenges related to data quality, technical intricacies, and time constraints, resulting in a reliable and robust dataset. The findings provide valuable information on the impact of Egyptian publications, offering insights into the scholarly influence of authors associated with Egyptian institutions. This research equips researchers and academics interested in evaluating the impact of Egyptian publications with valuable data for future studies, collaborations, and policy decisions.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: This image represents a sample citation network. A directed line from Paper A to Paper B indicates that Paper A cites Paper B. Notably, the grey area exhibits relatively high centrality, as each node (representing a paper) is connected to multiple surrounding nodes. In contrast, Paper 9 is located in a region of low connectivity, with minimal connections, making it an uncommon or isolated
• Figure 2: This diagram represents a co-authorship network, where each node corresponds to an author and a line (edge) between two nodes indicates collaboration between the authors. The weight $W_{A,B}$ on an edge represents the strength of collaboration between Author $A$ and Author $B$. Authors in the grey area exhibit high centrality, indicating that they are well-connected and collaborate with many others. In contrast, Author 2 is located in a low-centrality area, reflecting fewer collaborations within the network.
• Figure 3: Publications distribution over the years.
• Figure 4: Node degree distribution.
• Figure 5: Zoomed-in degree distributions: (a) Degree range 0-50, (b) Frequency range 0-500.