Collaboration Networks in AJCP (now updated!)

by Jon Scaccia March 2, 2022

Inspired by our recent deep dive into Implementation Science, I decided to dust off the code and turn it to another favorite journal, The American Journal of Community Psychology.

Going all the way back to July 16, 1974, 5,397 authors have published in AJCP. The graph below shows who has published here most frequently.

A very asute observation, courtesy of Dr. Dawn X. Henderson, pointed out that many of the top publishing authors appeared to be male. Her suggestion was to break down the analysis by decade and see whether this trend continued. See below!

UPDATE 3.4.22!

But this just tells us who published, not who published together. I put together a network plot that shows these collaborative networks. Here are the top 100 relationships within AJCP.

We can up the graph to include more people. Here’s 500.

And let’s go one more step. Here’s the top 1000 relationships. I tried to go up even a little more, but then the graph starts getting wonky. Distances between people start to get exaggerated, fonts get even smaller, and more crowded. It just doesn’t visualize anything cool. Even in this 1000 person version, several names get excluded because of excessive overlap.

What I find super interesting about this is that there are a ton of “independent” clustered here. When I did a similar plot for Implementation Science, people are much more networked together. Potentially this is a function of the diversity within the field, or at least what AJCP editors choose to publish about?

But what about what people write about?

Learning the answer to the first questions is one of the reasons we do what we do at PubTrawlr. We want to help people, be they academics or regular Joes and Janes on the street, be better able to engage with large amounts of scientific literature.

In that vein, it’s 101 Days of Science launch week here at PubTrawlr. We’re super pleased to offer Recent Trends in Community Psychology. Every 101 days, in your inbox, you can get a synthesis of the emerging research in community psychology. How else are you going to stay on top of 760 articles? Grad students can’t read them all!

We want to make it easier and more fun to consume the breadth of a field. This is one way that we can help you do that. Subscribe today!