%0 Report
%9 Working Paper
%A Quattrociocchi, Walter
%A Amblard, Frederic
%D 2011
%F eprints:2119
%I IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca
%K social networks analysis, evolving structures, scientific commu-  nities, emergence, time-varying graphs, temporal metrics, social selection.
%N  
%T Emergence through selection: the evolution of a scientific challenge
%U http://eprints.imtlucca.it/2119/
%X One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with  the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics and how their  processes lead to emergence according to the interactions among their components.  In this paper we approach the definition of new methodologies for the visualization  and the exploration of the dynamics at play in real dynamic social networks.We  present a recently introduced formalism called TVG (for time-varying graphs), which  was initially developed to model and analyze highly-dynamic and infrastructure-less  communication networks. As an application context, we chose the case of scientific  communities by analyzing a portion of the ArXiv repository (ten years of publications  in physics). The analysis presented in the paper passes through different data  transformations aimed at providing different perspectives on the scientific community  and its evolutions.  On a first level we discuss the dataset by means of both a static and temporal  analysis of citations and co-authorships networks. Afterward, as we consider that  scientific communities are at the same time communities of practice (through coauthorship)  and that a citation represents a deliberative selection pointing out the  relevance of a work in its scientific domain, we introduce a new transformation aimed  at capturing the interdependencies between collaborations' patterns and citations'  effects and how they make evolve a goal oriented systems as Science.  Finally, we show how through the TVG formalism and derived indicators, it is  possible to capture the interactions patterns behind the emergence (selection) of  a sub-community among others, as a goal-driven preferential attachment toward a  set of authors among which there are some key scientists (Nobel prizes) acting as  attractors on the community.