  This work is a study of the properties of collaboration networks employing
the formalism of weighted graphs to represent their one-mode projection. The
weight of the edges is directly the number of times that a partnership has been
repeated. This representation allows us to define the concept of "social
inertia" that measures the tendency of authors to keep on collaborating with
previous partners. We use a collection of empirical datasets to analyze several
aspects of the social inertia: 1) its probability distribution, 2) its
correlation with other properties, and 3) the correlations of the inertia
between neighbors in the network. We also contrast these empirical results with
the predictions of a recently proposed theoretical model for the growth of
collaboration networks.
