> Are you saying ..
No.
You seem to have a vivid imagination and not a lot of real world interaction with others.
People tend to largely clump when they collaborate; if you pivot via citeseer on each author in the given paper you'll see a number of different papers in common with each other (and a number of outgroup papers).
Mike Dentith, with an office some ~ 20km away from Curtin, is part of another large clump of papers in the same field - there are some interactions, of course, but the helicopter view of these papers and their co-author networks is not dissimilar to social media interactions that densely cluster with sparser interlinks.
Have you ever generated network visualisations of research papers | social media interactions?
It's an interesting exercise.