Scientific collaboration in co-authorship research: a method based on network analysis

This work presents a method to the study of scientific communication derived from network analysis methods. It has been analyzed the professional relationships of scientific collaboration between authors that use co-authoship, a new sub-area in scientific communication that has gained space in information science. In co-authorship, any two authors are defined as having a relationship if they have collaborated in the production of an article or scientific publication. This paper investigates whether this association allows the comprehension of the problems of scientific collaboration, for example, if knowledge is concentrated in a few countries or individuals, and how these individuals relate to each other. The methodology is based on the exploratory model proposed by Nooy, Mrvar e Batagelj (2011). From the point of view of bibliometrics, scientific collaborations were analyzed in the Web of Science database. The results obtained showed that the field of co-authorship spans several countries and different areas of interest. It is observed that the association of bibliometric methods and network analysis contributes to a better interpretation of the results, mainly through the visual inspection that network analysis methods are able to provide.

Co-authorship; Scientific collaboration; Network analysis