The structural shift and collaboration capacity in GenBank Networks: A longitudinal study

Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions and related publications. As a new data source for studying collaboration networks, metadata in data repositories compensate for the limitations of publication-based research on collaboration networks. This paper reports the findings from a GenBank metadata analytics project. We used network science methods to uncover the structures and dynamics of GenBank collaboration networks from 1992–2018. The longitudinality and large scale of this data collection allowed us to unravel the evolution history of collaboration networks and identify the trend of flattening network structures over time and optimal assortative mixing range for enhancing collaboration capacity. By incorporating metadata from the data production stage with the publication stage, we uncovered new characteristics of collaboration networks as well as developed new metrics for assessing the effectiveness of enablers of collaboration—scientific and technical human capital, cyberinfrastructure, and science policy.