Who is the best connected EC researcher? Centrality analysis of the complex network of authors in evolutionary computation

Abstract: Co-authorship graphs (that is, the graph of authors linked by co-authorship of papers) are complex networks, which expresses the dynamics of a complex system. Only recently its study has started to draw interest from the EC community, the first paper dealing with it having been published two years ago. In this paper we will study the co-authorship network of EC at a microscopic level. Our objective is ascertaining which are the most relevant nodes (i.e. authors) in it. For this purpose, we examine several metrics defined in the complex-network literature, and analyze them both in isolation and combined within a Pareto-dominance approach. The result of our analysis indicates that there are some well-known researchers that appear systematically in top rankings. This also provides some hints on the social behavior of our community.