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Hsu et al. Neuroimmunol Neuroinflammation 2018;5:9 I http://dx.doi.org/10.20517/2347-8659.2018.03 Page 7 of 9

DISCUSSION
What this adds to what was known
Many previous types of research [9-11] have investigated co-author collaboration using SNA. The results (the
most number of articles from the USA and Europe) are similar to the findings that dominant nations in
science come from the USA and Europe [21-23] , but China recently has an increasing trend in publication.
Referring to the apocryphal story told to discover the co-occurrence about beer and diaper sales , we
[6-8]
presented a novel method incorporating SNA with Google Maps to explore the data. It can be seen that
visual representations offered to the readers are rare in literature. Traditionally, it is hard to observe the
association of two or more symptoms or entities together that appeared in a network at that moment.

Journal authorship collaboration compared with each other using Google Maps is illustrated in this study.
We can see that many links are connecting two nations which indicate a collaboration pattern in paper
publication similar to the previous study . Hence, it is easy to observe the phenomena of international
[7]
author collaboration in neuroimmunology and neuroinflammation, which is inconsistent with the earlier
reviews that investigated scientific collaboration of Iranian Psychology and Psychiatry Researchers [23,24] .

There are 319 papers with the keyword of SNA when searching Medline on December 21, 2017. There were
only two papers [25,26] that incorporated medical subject heading into SNA to release relevant knowledge to
readers. However, only a few [27,28] include Google Maps link like we used in our current study. The CCs we
illustrated at references [17-20] are called overall CCs. The CCs in figures are 1.0, 0.61, and 0.60, respectively,
which is different from the global CCs or individual CC defined by each cluster or by each node. Evidence
suggests that in most real-world networks, nodes tend to create a tightly knit groups characterized by
a relatively high density of ties; this likelihood tends to be higher than the average probability of a link
randomly established between two nodes [15,29] .

What it implies and what should be changed?
Scientific publication is one of the objective measurements to evaluate the achievements of a medical specialty or
[30]
discipline . It is worth using SNA and Google Maps to explore knowledge to readers in the future.
Many algorithms and measures (or indicators) have been developed in SNA to the graphical exploration of
our data. If we investigate any author or paper most fits the research domain in a target journal, the centrality
measures can be used . It means that the core subject can be analyzed using the centrality measure [11,24]
[9]
yielded by SNA.

Strengths of this study
The way we incorporated SNA with Google Maps is unique when compared with these published papers [9-11]
merely using a single method of SNA. Another strength and feature of this study is that with Google Maps
linked to the references [18-20] , for interested readers, one can manipulate the link in their own ways on the Google
dashboards. The national distribution in Figure 1 allow the reader to easily understand the feature of international
author collaborations in neuroimmunology and neuroinflammation. One picture is worth ten thousand words.
We hope following studies can report other kinds of information using Google API in the future.

Limitations and future study
The interpretation and generalization of the conclusions of this research should be carried out with caution.
First, the data from this study are from Medline for a single journal. It is worth noting that any attempt to
generalize the findings of this study should be cautious in the fields of journal domains.

Secondly, although the data were extracted from Medline and carefully dealt with during every linkage as
correctly as possible, the original downloaded text file might have some errors in symbols such as period and
comma in author address that may lead to some bias in the resulting nation distribution.