Coauthorship networks: A directed network approach considering the order and number of coauthors

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“In many scientific fields, the order of coauthors on a paper conveys information about each individual’s contribution to a piece of joint work. We argue that in prior network analyses of coauthorship networks, the information on ordering has been insufficiently considered because ties between authors are typically symmetrized. This is basically the same as assuming that each co-author has contributed equally to a paper. We introduce a solution to this problem by adopting a coauthorship credit allocation model proposed by Kim and Diesner (2014), which in its core conceptualizes co-authoring as a directed, weighted, and self-looped network. We test and validate our application of the adopted framework based on a sample data of 861 authors who have published in the journal Psychometrika. Results suggest that this novel sociometric approach can complement traditional measures based on undirected networks and expand insights into coauthoring patterns such as the hierarchy of collaboration among scholars. As another form of validation, we also show how our approach accurately detects prominent scholars in the Psychometric Society affiliated with the journal.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00361

Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites

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“The rapid rise in popularity of online social networking has been followed by a slew of services aimed at an academic audience. This project sought to explore network structure in these sites, and to explore trends in network structure by surveying participants about their use of sites and motivations for making connections. Social network analysis revealed that discipline was influential in defining community structure, while academic seniority was linked to the position of nodes within the network. The survey revealed a contradiction between academics use of the sites and their position within the networks the sites foster. Junior academics were found to be more active users of the sites, agreeing to a greater extent with the perceived benefits, yet having fewer connections and occupying a more peripheral position in the network.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937

ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?

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“ResearchGate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications, and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their work and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. This article assesses whether ResearchGate usage and publication data broadly reflect existing academic hierarchies and whether individual countries are set to benefit or lose out from the site. The results show that rankings based on ResearchGate statistics correlate moderately well with other rankings of academic institutions, suggesting that ResearchGate use broadly reflects the traditional distribution of academic capital. Moreover, while Brazil, India, and some other countries seem to be disproportionately taking advantage of ResearchGate, academics in China, South Korea, and Russia may be missing opportunities to use ResearchGate to maximize the academic impact of their publications.”

URL : http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/ResearchGate.pdf

Trends in Research Librarianship Literature A Social Network…

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Trends in Research Librarianship Literature: A Social Network Analysis of Articles :

“The purpose of this article is to identify the bibliometric characteristics of research librarianship literature and to visualize relationships in research librarianship by means of social network analysis. It was found out that the majority (66%) of the articles had single authorship and College & Research Libraries is the prominent actor among the research librarianship journals. It was also observed that Peter Hernon is the most productive and cited author in the field. The findings of this study can be used by the research librarianship community to better understand their core literature.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2011-3_4/index.html?000554