Figure 3
The community structure of the patent co-inventorship network: Europe versus the United States.
This figure shows the results obtained performing a community detection analysis both on the (a) European and the (b) US networks using the Newman-Girvan method. In this representation each community has been given a different color. It can be seen that, in the European case, the community structure almost perfectly matches the national boundaries of the 15 member states of the European Union. The only significant difference seems to be Germany, which is sectioned off into more than one community. The US community structure reveals almost an opposite behavior: communities are stretched out over more than one state and at great distances. Each community color is graduated according to the |dQ| of the node: darker colored nodes have a higher |dQ| so they are “more central”, while lighter colored ones are less central since they have a lower |dQ|. The nodes with the highest |dQ| are considered community core regions. We use the same community color coding for networks (top) and maps (bottom). Maps and networks were generated using the open source software Gephi and QGIS, respectively.
