Subfield effects on the core of coauthors

It is examined whether the number (J) of (joint) publications of a "main scientist" with her/his coauthors ranked according to rank (r) importance, i.e. J ∝ 1/r, as found by Ausloos (Scientometrics 95:895–909, 2013) still holds for subfields, i.e. when the "main scientist" has worked on different, sometimes overlapping, subfields. Two cases are studied. It is shown that the law holds for large subfields. As shown, in an Appendix, is also useful to combine small topics into large ones for better statistics. It is observed that the sub-cores are much smaller than the overall coauthor core measure. Nevertheless, the smallness of the core and sub-cores may imply further considerations for the evaluation of team research purposes and activities