In our newest work, we provided a detailed analysis of the co-authorship network of a core and pioneer community of researchers from five institutions originally recognized as Centers of Excellence (COE) in Physics in the Philippines: 

• K.M.A. Aguana and R.C. Batac, Emergence of power-law statistics in the co-authorship networks of Philippine physics researchers, Scientometrics (2025). 

We used the data from Scopus from 1985 to 2024, limited to researchers from five universities offering doctoral degrees in physics: Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), De La Salle University (DLSU), Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT), University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD), and University of San Carlos (USC). These higher education institutions form the pioneer community of physics researcher from Philippine academia, and contributed half of the total paper output in the first three decades of the study. Finally, the physics programs from these universities are the first to have been named as Centers of Excellence (COE) by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). 

The analysis of the data reveal faster-than-linear cumulative trends in productivity (number of papers) and community (number of authors) across the four decades, fitted with exponential trends. The last few years showing slight deviations due to the occurrence of large collaborative works (with hundreds, even thousands of authors) and due to the exclusion of other institutions doing research works in physics.

Interestingly, the distribution of the counts of co-author (number of unique collaborators) and co-authorships (number of instances of collaborations, i.e. collaboration multiplied by the number of papers) follow robust power-laws over the last two decades. This, in turn, leads to rank-frequency trends that follow Zipf's law with exponents close to unity (for co-author statistics). This result is remarkable, as it is obtained within two decades of growth of the Philippine physics community. This suggests that the mechanisms that give rise to the emergence of these robust heavy-tailed statistics manifest early in the evolution of a complex system. 

More importantly, the network analyses done at the individual, institutional, and country levels reveal the extent of collaborations among Filipino researchers in physics. This preliminary work highlights the need for encouraging stronger collaborations among the researchers, not only from academia but from other sectors (such as the government, industry, and business), to align with the targets outlined in the national science and technology agenda. 

Kiona Moria A. Aguana is a student under the Master of Science in Data Science program of the DLSU. Dr. Rene C. Batac is a principal investigator from the Complex Systems Group of the Department of Physics, College of Science, DLSU.