We construct the co-authorship networks from published papers from five higher education institutions in the Philippines that offer doctoral degrees in Physics. Pure co-authorship networks from 1985 to 2024 show accelerating growth trends both in the number of new authors added to the network and the number of papers published every year. While the giant connected component grows steadily, the number of disparate subgraphs also increased, suggesting a balancing interplay between the generation of independent new clusters and merging of older, larger ones. Collaboration networks show the need to strengthen within-community linkages. Finally, we observe power-law regimes in the distributions of co-authors and co-authorships, which lead to Zipf's law trends in the rank-size statistics of co-authorship counts. The deviations from the power-laws and Zipfian behaviors start to emerge in the last decade, when authors embarked on large collaborative research works. Studies of the dynamical behavior of a relatively young community such as this core Philippine Physics co-authorship network provide insights that are not readily apparent from similar works on older, more mature groups with larger bibliometric catalogs. Moreover, the study presents useful quantitative results that may guide the relevant stakeholders in furthering growth and productivity.
Aguana et al. (Sat,) studied this question.