文章基本信息

标题：Network communities within and across borders
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作者：Federica Cerina ; Alessandro Chessa ; Fabio Pammolli 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2015
卷号：4
期号：1
DOI：10.1038/srep04546
语种：English
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：We investigate the impact of borders on the topology of spatially embedded networks. Indeed territorial subdivisions and geographical borders significantly hamper the geographical span of networks thus playing a key role in the formation of network communities. This is especially important in scientific and technological policy-making, highlighting the interplay between pressure for the internationalization to lead towards a global innovation system and the administrative borders imposed by the national and regional institutions. In this study we introduce an outreach index to quantify the impact of borders on the community structure and apply it to the case of the European and US patent co-inventors networks. We find that (a) the US connectivity decays as a power of distance, whereas we observe a faster exponential decay for Europe; (b) European network communities essentially correspond to nations and contiguous regions while US communities span multiple states across the whole country without any characteristic geographic scale. We confirm our findings by means of a set of simulations aimed at exploring the relationship between different patterns of cross-border community structures and the outreach index.