m. ekrami

Due to the importance of the interdisciplinary investigations in create of knowledge, this research study relationships between centrality metrics with researcher's scientific productivity and Performance and visualization of co-authorship social network in distance education.

The present study is an applied study of scientometrics. The statistical population is the scientific productions (In overall 40252) of all researchers, which at least one of the articles is indexed in the Web of Science citations (ISI) database from 1992 to 2012. After preparation the co-authorship matrix of countries (C1) and researchers (AU), in order to extract the results, three types of softwares it has been used: (a) Social Network Analysis Softwares (UCINET & Bibexcel), (b) Visualization of Co-Authorship Social Network Softwares (Pajek & NetDraw) and (c) Statistical Analysis Softwares (SPSS).

The results show that there is a growing growth in increase of co-authorship between scholars in distance education. Among the scholars, Liu, J; Chen, Y; Dodson, SC; Chen, X and Chen, J respectively have the highest measure of articles and also Chen, Y; Dodson, SC; Liu, B; Zhou, DX and Liu, J have the highest amount of citations received to the articles. Also in terms of the superior couples of the author, couples of (Liu J** Chen H) with 28 cases scientific collaboration had the highest rating and then couples of the (Chen Y ** chang C) and (Li Z ** Chen J) are in the next ranks. In addition, USA, Algeria, Argentina and Austria are ranked first to forth in terms of the number of records. In degree centrality, scholars such as Liu, J; Chen, Y and Dodson, SC, in closeness centrality, Chen, T; Liu, B and Chen, H and in betweenness centrality, Chen, H; Zhu, Y and Chen, J ranked first to third. Finally, the research findings showed that there is a significant relationship between the researcher's centrality scores with their scientific productivity and performance.

The results indicate that the number of citations received by researchers is a function of the number of articles published by them. Also, researchers in a co-authorship social network have social influence that have earned a higher centrality score.