A Study of Scientific Collaboration and Co-authorship Networks within Knowledge Management Papers in the Category of Library Science, Information Science in the Web of Science

Scientific collaboration in the production of knowledge artifacts is especially important in a multi-disciplinary field such as Knowledge Management.
This paper examines the co-authorship patterns within KM Papers in the Category of Library Science, Information Science in the WOS. For this purpose, data from 2961 papers for the period 1989 to 2014 was extracted from the database. Using Zipf Law, an analysis of 6511 paper's authors identified 133 authors as the most productive and considered these for further analysis of co-authorship networks.
Findings: The co-authorship matrix was prepared using the RavarMatrix software package, and networks were created using Ucinet and its supplementary package, NetDraw.
Results indicate that the growth in the number of papers and authors across the years of the study follows a geometric exponential growth trend. The most prevalent authorship model in the production of these papers is a dual authorship (two- author) model. Each year the number of authors has increased 1. 332 times more than the previous year, while the number of papers has increased 1. 291 times.