Structure of Knowledge Organization based on Co-Authorship Network Analysis

Knowledge Organizing is one of the oldest and most basic topics in Library and information science Whose main domain is immutable over time; However, the environment in which the organization operates has changed dramatically and will continue to change. Published research often describes only certain aspects that show only a partial picture of the perspective of its knowledge organization research. In fact, it is difficult for researchers to get an overview of this field by reviewing such articles. Scientometric methods are expected to help meet this need. This study aims to investigate the centrality indicators in the co-authorship network of articles in the field of knowledge organization.

This research is an applied type that has done with the approach of scientometrics and analysis of social networks. The research records are compiled based on all articles in the two journals of Knowledge Organization and Cataloging & Classification Quarterly as well as 100 keywords related to the field of knowledge organization indexed in Web of Science from 1900 to 2019. Finally, the retrieved records were limited to research papers, conference papers, and review papers and limited to the subject of Library and information filed. Out of 23,525 authors who were involved in the publication of 17,950 articles, 311 with at least 8 articles were analyzed using UCINET software. After that, a square matrix of dimensions 311 by 311 was formed, and finally the co-authorship network was drawn based on the centrality indicators. Bib Excel software was used to draw the matrix and NetDraw software was used to draw the co-authorship network.

Results indicated taht the average number of authors per article is 1.31. 23,525 authors have contributed articles in this field, of which Professor Birger Yorland of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is the most active researcher in Knowledge organization with 43 articles. Professor Wolfang J. Stoke of the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, came in second with 36 papers. Professor Borgman of UCLA is third with 31 articles. Analysis of data related to co-authorship analysis indicates that out of 17,950 articles under review, 8964 (49.93%) have been written with the mono-writing approach as the most common approach in knowledge organization and other articles (50.07%) in the format Co-authors have been offered, of which two authors (24.68%) have a larger share. In examining the characteristics of centrality indicators, Zheng, Feroo, Giles, and Goh, gained the top scores in the Degree Centrality, Closeness Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Eigen vector, respectively.

According to the results of the present study, it seems that prominent researchers in the field of knowledge organization, despite being productive, have not been able to play a significant role in the formation of the co-authorship network in this field.