A Scientometric and Social Network Analysis

Abstract

This paper examines the role of world countries in Library and Information Science (LIS) research for a 50 year period (1963-2012) using scientometrics and Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches. A total of 58757 papers published in 83 journals indexed in the Web of Science’s Information Science and Library Science subject category were covered in this study. The overall structure and evolution of the collaboration network of countries were investigated using macro-level SNA metrics such as density, connectedness, clustering coefficient, mean distance, diameter, components and clusters of the network. Additionally, scientometric indicators such as the number of publications, number of citations and self-citations, citations per paper, number of highly cited papers, percentage of citedness, activity index and relative quality index as well as four micro-level SNA metrics, namely degree, betweenness, closeness and number of immediate vertices were adopted to analyze the function of countries in the network. Findings show that the 58757 papers sampled was contributed by 151 unique countries (vertices) connected together through 11535 links (co-authorships). The collaboration network of countries seems to exhibit “scale-free” and “small world” network properties and the famous notion of “six degrees of separation” is valid in this network. The co-authorship network of countries consists of 15 components, the largest of which contains 137 vertices, yielded a ratio of 90% of the whole network. Clustering analysis shows that this network comprises 39 clusters.Amongst them, the eleventh and ninth clusters which contain US and UK, have the highest density. The function of the top 50 countries in LIS research was also studied using various scientometric and SNA matrices

Keywords

• Library and Information Science
• Scientometrics
• Social Network Analysis