A Survey on Density and Size of Co-authorship Networks in Information Science Journals

Scientific collaboration has always been of interest to researchers. The analyses of data relating to scientific collaboration is one of the techniques by which we can evaluate research activities. Co-authorship network analysis can represent good information regarding the patterns and structures of co-authorship. Social network analysis was used as the research method. The research population included twenty journals of Information Science which had an impact factor of 0.635 as a minimum from the years 1996 to 2010. The research findings showed that Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association with 0/3 network density has a highest co-authorship network density. Low connection existed in coauthorship network of Information Science journals and co-authorship networks of these journals were loose and sparse. The Results showed that co-authorship networks of information science journals had a low density. Compactness of this journal is low and co-authorship networks had a low cohesion. Results of this research also showed that the density of co-authorship networks of Information Science is lower than Medical Sciences and higher than Management and Social Computations.