Open AccessPatterns of research collaboration in a digital library for Economics
Author(s) -
Bakkalbasi Nisa,
Krichel Thomas
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504301148
Subject(s) - centrality , scope (computer science) , service (business) , social network analysis , quality (philosophy) , data science , field (mathematics) , computer science , population , world wide web , sociology , business , marketing , social media , philosophy , programming language , demography , mathematics , epistemology , combinatorics , pure mathematics
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) has been conceived and developed to promote scholarly communication and to enhance the dissemination of research findings in the field of economics. RePEc offers the RePEc Author Service (RAS) where economics authors can claim authorship of the research papers that are described in RePEc archives. The data from this service forms a high‐quality authorship database. We investigate the structure of research collaborations within RePEc by applying social network analysis to the co‐authorship network formed by the RAS registrants. We perform a component size analysis and calculate centrality metrics. Our findings imply that the RAS registrant population is made up of highly active academics that are well connected to each other. In addition, RAS registrants appear to have a broad range of coauthors, with most individuals having only a few coauthors, whereas a few have many. We compare and contrast results from a number of recent studies of similar scope on co‐authorship networks.