The Evolution of Turing Award Collaboration Network: Bibliometric-Level and Network-Level Metrics

The year of 2017 for the 50th anniversary of the Turing Award, which represents the top-level award in the computer science field, is a milestone. We study the long-term evolution of the Turing Award Collaboration Network, and it can be considered as a microcosm of the computer science field from 1974 to 2016. First, scholars tend to publish articles by themselves at the early stages, and they began to focus on tight collaboration since the late 1980s. Second, compared with the same scale random network, although the Turing Award Collaboration Network has small-world properties, it is not a scale-free network. The reason may be that the number of collaborators per scholar is limited. It is impossible for scholars to connect to others freely (preferential attachment) as the scale-free network. Third, to measure how far a scholar is from the Turing Award, we propose a metric called the Turing Number (TN) and find that the TN decreases gradually over time. Meanwhile, we discover the phenomenon that scholars prefer to gather into groups to do research with the development of computer science. This article presents a new way to explore the evolution of academic collaboration network in the field of computer science by building and analyzing the Turing Award Collaboration Network for decades.