Personal Networks of Scientific Collaborators: A Large Scale Experimental Analysis of Their Evolution

Sarra Djemili, Claudia Marinica, Maria Malek, Dimitris Kotzinos

Abstract: When an individual joins an Online Social Network (OSN), he creates connections by interacting with the other users directly or indirectly and forms its own Online Personal Network (OPN). These OPNs are not static, but they evolve over time as new people join or quit them and as new relationships are established or old ones broken. Understanding how OPNs are evolving is still missing in the current literature, while OSNs’ evolution was widely addressed and many models were proposed. In this paper, we propose to fill this gap by performing an experimental analysis over a large set of real OPNs by the mean of the computation of metrics that characterize their structure. We examine how these metrics behave when the OPNs change over time in order to discover the properties driving the evolution of their structure, which can help in providing evolution models dedicated to OPNs.