Social network analysis of the bioinformatics scholars

Bioinformatics is one of the hottest research fields right now. Large amount of bioinformatics related international academic conferences have been organized every year. The program committee members of the conferences are the leading researchers in this field. In this paper, we study the social network of the bioinformatics conference committees and perform some further analysis among the committee members and conferences. Focused on the top 51 Highest H-index bioinformatics related conferences, we extracted the committee members and construct four different networks. With the adjacent matrixes and detailed analysis on these networks, we find that top 3 conferences with highest degree are BIBM 2012, APBC 2011, WABI 2010 (ISBRA 2012, with the same degree as WABI 2010), and the top 5 committee members with highest degree are Tatsuya Akutsu, David Sankoff, Lusheng Wang, and Russell Schwartz, and Satoru Miyano. We also pick out a research community with a centre node named as Bonnie Berger. From the view of network characteristic, it is found that all the committee member relationship networks and the conference relationship network belong to scale free, however, only the latter is a small world one. All these findings support that social network is a powerful tool for mining the bioinformatics conferences program committee data. Copyright © 2013 American Scientific Publishers.