Search results
1 – 10 of over 1000The purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide a review of the growing literature on co-authorship networks and the research gaps that may be investigated for future studies…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide a review of the growing literature on co-authorship networks and the research gaps that may be investigated for future studies in this field.
Design/methodology/approach
The existing literature on co-authorship networks was identified, evaluated and interpreted. Narrative review style was followed.
Findings
Co-authorship, a proxy of research collaboration, is a key mechanism that links different sets of talent to produce a research output. Co-authorship could also be seen from the perspective of social networks. An in-depth analysis of such knowledge networks provides an opportunity to investigate its structure. Patterns of these relationships could reveal, for example, the mechanism that shapes our scientific community. The study provides a review of the expanding literature on co-authorship networks.
Originality/value
This is one of the first comprehensive reviews of network-based studies on co-authorship. The field is fast evolving, opening new gaps for potential research. The study identifies some of these gaps.
Details
Keywords
Many studies have investigated how the structure of the collaborative networks of researchers influences the nature of their work, and its outcome. Co-authorship networks (CANs…
Abstract
Purpose
Many studies have investigated how the structure of the collaborative networks of researchers influences the nature of their work, and its outcome. Co-authorship networks (CANs) have been widely looked at as proxies that can help bring understanding to the structure of research collaborative ties. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for describing what influences the formation of different research collaboration patterns.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use social network analysis (SNA) to analyze the co-authorship ego networks of the ten most central authors in 24 years of papers (703 papers and 1,118 authors) published in the Proceedings of CASCON, a computer science conference. In order to understand what lead to the formation of the different CANs the authors examined, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with these authors.
Findings
Based on this examination, the authors propose a typology that differentiates three styles of co-authorship: matchmaking, brokerage, and teamwork. The authors also provide quantitative SNA-based measures that can help place researchers’ CAN into one of these proposed categories. Given that many different network measures can describe the collaborative network structure of researchers, the authors believe it is important to identify specific network structures that would be meaningful when studying research collaboration. The proposed typology can offer guidance in choosing the appropriate measures for studying research collaboration.
Originality/value
The results presented in this paper highlight the value of combining SNA analysis with interviews when studying CAN. Moreover, the results show how co-authorship styles can be used to understand the mechanisms leading to the formation of collaborative ties among researchers. The authors discuss several potential implications of these findings for the study of research collaborations.
Details
Keywords
Jin Gao, Julianne Nyhan, Oliver Duke-Williams and Simon Mahony
This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form.
Design/methodology/approach
This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.
Findings
The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.
Originality/value
This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to provide information about the structure of collaborative work among Argentinian economics. The study provides specific applied research of social network…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to provide information about the structure of collaborative work among Argentinian economics. The study provides specific applied research of social network analysis focus on this profession in this specific country.
Design/methodology/approach
The contribution opted for applying social network analysis tools to papers presented in a congress and published in its proceedings. The authors focus in detecting main actors, groups of co-authorship, professionals acting as bridges between groups and differences between genders.
Findings
The paper provides empirical insights about how co-authorship has evolved between Argentine economists. The authors find that structural properties of the network, main actors, both male and female, main universities or center that affiliates them, a gender gap that might be closing out.
Research limitations/implications
The paper focuses on the network for the period 1964-2014 without a more detailed dynamic. It also does not explain main topics worked by the authors.
Practical implications
The work provides knowledge about how groups are created in Economics in Argentina, how cooperation has evolved and what has been the role of women in this development. It also shows how different departments and entities collaborate with diverse success in the creation of new knowledge in Economics in Argentina.
Originality/value
The paper works with data from a source of information non-previously studied and contributes in explaining a particular type of collaborative work in a profession in Argentina.
Details
Keywords
Jin Gao, Julianne Nyhan, Oliver Duke-Williams and Simon Mahony
This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH) journals. In particular, it seeks to detect patterns in authors' countries of work and languages in co-authorship networks.
Design/methodology/approach
Through an in-depth co-authorship network analysis, this study analysed bibliometric data from three canonical DH journals over a range of 52 years (1966–2017). The results are presented as visualised networks with centrality calculations.
Findings
The results suggest that while DH scholars may not collaborate as frequently as those in other disciplines, when they do so their collaborations tend to be more international than in many Science and Engineering, and Social Sciences disciplines. DH authors in some countries (e.g. Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, and the UK) have the highest international co-author rates, while others have high national co-author rates but low international rates (e.g. Japan, the USA, and France).
Originality/value
This study is the first DH co-authorship network study that explores the apparent connection between language and collaboration patterns in DH. It contributes to ongoing debates about diversity, representation, and multilingualism in DH and academic publishing more widely.
Details
Keywords
Gino Cattani and Daniele Rotolo
Social network theory and analytic tools have been increasingly used to examine the interaction between science and technology. Recently, researchers have paid attention to the…
Abstract
Social network theory and analytic tools have been increasingly used to examine the interaction between science and technology. Recently, researchers have paid attention to the role of publishing inventors, that is, individuals bridging the collaborative networks between authors (co-authorship network) and inventors (co-invention network). Building on this research, we study how publishing inventors’ structural position in the joint co-authorship and co-invention network affects the quality of the inventions to which they contribute. Specifically, we identify publishing inventors who play a pivotal role in holding the two networks together: their removal not only increases the network fragmentation but also disconnects the joint co-authorship and co-invention network. We define these publishing inventors as cutpoints and find them to contribute to inventions of greater quality. We situate the analysis within the context of the emerging field of nanotechnology. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to identify embedded communities among Medical Ethics scholars in France based on their position and strength of association in the social networks…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify embedded communities among Medical Ethics scholars in France based on their position and strength of association in the social networks they form.
Design/methodology/approach
The author constructed a co-authorship network by linking two authors if they co-authored a paper. Once the co-authorship network was constructed, the author investigated the entire network quantitatively using standard research methods known as social network analysis. The author’s mechanism of community detection was via identification, i.e. communities were user-defined based on topological analysis.
Findings
The study identified that communities formed by trust (bonding or repeat connections) or by prestige (connection of well-connected scholars with those that are already well-connected) overlap each other, suggesting that trust and prestige may go hand in hand in sustaining communities. Structural holes within trust networks indicated that some actors played more of a broker role than did other actors.
Research limitations/implications
The study uses Web of Science field based category to extract data. Although thorough cleaning of data has been performed, author disambiguation over a three decade period remains a limitation.
Originality/value
Although there have been numerous studies on mapping co-authorship networks, there has been limited work investigating the underlying communities formed by author associations. The results of this study should be of immense benefit to those studying the science of science and S&T policy.
Details
Keywords
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a sparse and relatively small giant component (GC) will capture highly productive authors.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a sparse and relatively small giant component (GC) will capture highly productive authors.
Design/methodology/approach
The author used a geographically dispersed data set involving authors in the field of economics in ten countries in Southeast Asia and applied social network analysis methods to investigate the structure and dynamics of GCs.
Findings
Results reveal that a GC, characterized by both low density and small size, can still capture a significant percentage (68 per cent of the top 25) of the most productive authors. There seems to be a topological backing for this occurrence. The number of direct connections (or “degree”) in the GC was correlated with research productivity, such that high-degree authors were almost twice as productive as low-degree authors. It is probable that productive authors having higher than average degrees may be the cause of the formation of the GC. The author hypothesize that irrespective of its size or sparseness, GCs in co-authorship networks may still represent the seat of main intellectual activity in the network.
Originality/value
This is one of the first studies to quantitatively analyse the ability of a co-authorship-based less-prominent GC to capture prominent authors.
Details
Keywords
Regina Collins and Nancy Steffen-Fluhr
The purpose of this paper is to describe how one group of ADVANCE Project researchers investigated faculty co-authorship networks to identify relationships between women’s…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe how one group of ADVANCE Project researchers investigated faculty co-authorship networks to identify relationships between women’s positions in these networks, their research productivity and their advancement at the university – and to make those relationships transparent.
Design/methodology/approach
Multiple methods for capturing faculty network data were evaluated, including collecting self-reported data and mining bibliometric data from various web-based sources. Faculty co-authorship networks were subsequently analyzed using several methodologies including social network analysis (SNA), network visualizations and the Kaplan–Meier product limit estimator.
Findings
Results suggest that co-authorship provides an important way for faculty to signal the value of their work, meaning that co-authoring with many others may be beneficial to productivity and promotion. However, patterns of homophily indicate that male faculty tend to collaborate more with other men, reducing signaling opportunities for women. Visualizing these networks can assist faculty in finding and connecting with new collaborators and can provide administrators with unique views of the interactions within their organizations. Finally, Kaplan–Meier survival studies showed longitudinal differences in the retention and advancement of faculty based on gender.
Originality/value
Together, these findings begin to shed light on subtle differences that, over time, may account for the significant gender disparities at STEM institutions, patterns which should be investigated and addressed by administrators. Lessons learned, as well as the novel use of SNA and Kaplan–Meier in investigating gender differences in STEM faculty, provide important findings for other researchers seeking to conduct similar studies at their own institutions.
Details
Keywords
Sameer Kumar and Jariah Mohd. Jan
The purpose of this paper is to compute and analyze the topological properties of co-authorship network formed between earth scientists in India. As a case study, the authors…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compute and analyze the topological properties of co-authorship network formed between earth scientists in India. As a case study, the authors evaluate bibliographic data of authors who have contributed research articles in the Journal of the Geological Society of India, a premier earth science journal in India.
Design/methodology/approach
Research articles totaling 3,903 records from 1970 to 2011 were harvested from the ISI Web of Science SCI database and analyzed using Social Network Analysis.
Findings
The author productivity in terms of number of papers published followed Lotka's law with β=2.1027. A dense giant component was detected that spanned 73 percent of the network with a density of 0.0017 and clustering coefficient of 0.631, suggesting high level of knowledge diffusion and a rapid flow of information and creativity in this network. Local metrics were calculated using degree, betweenness and closeness centralities. A strong correlation was seen between degree and author productivity (number of works) and betweenness centrality and author productivity, suggesting that author's number of connections and controlling “in-between” position in the network may be providing the authors’ with the knowledge and resources to be more productive.
Originality/value
The impact of human actions on the earth systems is a hot topic of research in India. This is one of the first works that investigates co-authorship networks of Indian earth science researchers.
Details