Understanding the nature and organization of scientific communities is of broad interest. The `Invisible College' is a historical metaphor for one such type of community and the search for such `colleges' can be framed as the detection and analysis of small groups of scientists working on problems of common interests. Case studies have previously been conducted on individual communities with respect to their scientific and social behavior. In this study, we introduce, a new and scalable community finding approach. Supplemented by expert assessment, we use the convergence of two different clustering methods to select article clusters generated from over two million articles from the field of immunology spanning an eleven year period with relevant cluster quality indicators for evaluation. Finally, we identify author communities defined by these clusters. A sample of the article clusters produced by this pipeline was reviewed by experts, and shows strong thematic relatedness, suggesting that the inferred author communities may represent valid communities of practice. These findings suggest that such convergent approaches may be useful in the future.
How well does I3 perform for impact measurement compared to other bibliometric indicators? The convergent validity of several (field-normalized) indicators
Research networks generated by organizational structures, co-authorships and citations: A Case Study of German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations
