An Analysis of Co-Authorship Network in the Iranian Sociology

• Format: Article
• Language: fas
• Published: University of Isfahan 2015-06-01
• Series: جامعه شناسی کاربردی
• Subjects: Sociology of Science; Co-Authorship; Cultural Capital; Emotional Energy; the Local Structure of Opportunity; Deposited Cultural Capital
• Online Access: http://uijs.ui.ac.ir/jas/browse.php?a_code=A-10-503-2&slc_lang=en&sid=1
• ISSN: 2008-5745; 2322-343X

Introduction   Among written academic collaborations, collaborating on writing scientific, research papers have a privileged position. It can show the rate of scientific development in any specialized discipline. T his study investigated the development of sociology in Iran through analyzing the co-authorship network in three main journal of "Iranian Journal of Sociology "," Sociological Studies " (a former Journal of Social Science) and "Quarterly Journal of Social Sciences” of Allameh Tabatabai University, during the years 2003-2012. The two main aims were: 1) drawing the structure of co-authorship network and, 2) identifying prolific authors of the structure. The theoretical motif of this study was Collins ideas in the sociology of science. Collins believes that the trajectory of action for everyone at every moment depends on his/her location in the local social structure. The local social structure is the position of the individual in interaction network ( Collins, 2002) . He believes that in the process of generating any idea by a person, the decisive factor is his/her local structure of opportunity. The relationships of individual with the kinds of people determine how much and what kind of cultural capital can be transferred to him/her. The quality of these relationships determines his/her emotional energy. His/her position in the network in centrality or isolation depends on the fluctuation of his/her emotional energy. The more cultural capital and emotional energy have ascribed by everyone, the more increase in his/her status in the local structure of opportunity, affecting his/her creativity and publications positively.     Materials & Methods   The research data was produced through consideration of each article and entering the appropriate information in Excel software. After performing statistical calculations and drawing diagrams in this software, relational data has been generated and was transferred to the Social Network Analysis Software, PAJEK. Using this software, collaboration networks were drawn and calculation of network analysis indicators was performed. To study co-authorship network, indicators such as density, average degree, clustering coefficient, layout of components and their arrangement were used and the cumulative structure of scientific collaborations of the Iranian sociologists were analyzed and interpreted. Using indicators of centrality, the effective and important authors in the process of network communications were studied .     Discussion of Results & Conclusions   The scrutiny of co-authorship network among the prolific authors of the three journals did show that three main attitudes can be recognized: 1) some of the authors do not have a tendency to collaborate at all. For instance, Jalaeepour published nine articles alone. Therefore, he did not attend in the network eternally. 2) The second group was highly eager to publish with others. Tavassoli and Azad Armarki were two outstanding scholars in this group. For example: Tavassoli published nine articles with others (out of his 11 articles). 3) The third group of the authors covered both the above mentioned attitudes; Late Mohammed Abdullahi has been placed in this group. It could be concluded that a high rate of publication by a scholar alone shows his strong emotional energy. The results also indicate that because of the lack of normativity in scientific relations at the Iranian sociology, necessarily persons’ creativity and scientific productivity did not depend on their local structure of opportunity. Co-authorship network composed of distributed components and size of density is low . The largest component contains 109 vertices (almost 25 percent of the network vertices) . About half of the components have been dual and indeed separated of the whole network . Academic collaboration network density was about 0.08 ; it means that only eight percent of the possible relationships among the universities are established . Therefore, the development of this knowledge in Iran is faced with serious doubt . Late Mohammed Abdullahi was known as the top sociologist in terms of his scientific productivity as well as its quality along with the highest cultural capital and emotional energy .