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M. Wertheimer, “über Gestalttheorie,” Erlangen, 1925. Gestalt Theory. In the translation by Willis D. Ellis published in his “Source Book of Gestalt Psychology”, Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1938. Reprinted by the Gestalt Journal Press, New York, 1997.

has been cited by the following article:

• TITLE: Who Is Collaborating with Whom in Science? Explanation of a Fundamental Principle

  AUTHORS: Hildrun Kretschmer, Theo Kretschmer

  KEYWORDS: Social Network Analysis (SNA); Collaboration; Co-Authorship; Mathematical Model

  JOURNAL NAME: Social Networking, Vol.2 No.3, July 4, 2013

  ABSTRACT: Since many decades power functions are well-known in counting single scientists or co-author pairs in social networks. However, in this paper a developed procedure for visualizing a bivariate distribution of co-author pairs’ frequencies hence producing three-dimensional graphs is presented. This distribution is explained by a fundamental principle of social group formation and described by a mathematical model. This model is applied to 52 co-authorship networks. For 96% of them the squared multiple R is larger than 0.98 and for 77% of the 52 networks even larger than 0.99. The visualized social Gestalts in form of three-dimensional graphs are rather identically with the corresponding empirical distributions. Question: Can we expect a general validity of this mathematical model for co-authorship networks?