Social Network Analysis Tools to Understand How Research Groups Interact

Abstract

This research is within the frame of sociometric studies of science, particularly the application of social networks to co-authorship, and patterns of citations among researchers in Psychiatry and Neurosciences, General Psychology, and Experimental Psychology. This chapter applies Social Network Analysis to information retrieval from a multidisciplinary database; subject headings lists are not considered sufficient or sufficiently flexible to describe relationships between the sciences. The aim is also to identify similarities and differences among these areas according to bibliometric and network indicators. Social Network Analysis used to select scientific articles within a discipline overcomes the rigidity of information retrieval based on a preselected set of topics. Network graphs can be used to show working groups that otherwise would remain hidden. It is useful, also, to overlap networks of co-authorship (explicit relations) and patterns of cited references (implicit relations), which allow comparison between individual author or groups and the whole group. Finally, the author highlights the need to adapt assessment indicators from different scientific areas to allow consideration of the characteristics of diverse disciplines, based not only on the productivity of individual authors, but also their capacity to mediate with other actors and works within the research system.