Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Omid Alipour ¹
• Faramarz Soheili ²
• Soraya Ziaei ²
• Ali Akbar Khasseh ²

¹ Ph.D. of Knowledge and Information Science, Payame Noor University, Iran

² Associate Professor, Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Payame Noor University, Iran

Abstract

1.Introduction
Knowledge organization is an old but fundamental topic in library and information science. The importance of knowledge organization is not limited to the fact that knowledge must be organized; otherwise, it cannot be retrieved and reused. Knowledge organization must be updated regularly to reflect the progress of human knowledge; therefore, changes are inevitable. Hence, it can be said that knowledge organization has become more important, diverse, and widespread in today's world. Published research often describes only specific aspects, which only provides a partial picture of the landscape of knowledge organization research. In fact, it is difficult for researchers to gain a comprehensive view of the field by reviewing such articles. This is possible by using scientometric tools. To promote the progress of scientific research and its publication, collaborations between researchers should be examined. Co-authorship, as one of the most formal manifestations of scientific collaboration, is an activity in which two or more authors participate in the production of science together. The expansion, specialization, and complexity of science in all fields have made it impossible for researchers to master not only all sciences, but also all topics in their field of expertise. Given this on the one hand, and the growth of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary sciences and research on the other, researchers are forced to collaborate with other people. This has led to co-authorship and its growth and expansion. By analyzing co-authorship networks, the social characteristics of the knowledge structure at different levels such as individuals, organizations, sectors, and countries can be revealed. It is expected that the results of this study will help experts in this field to understand the structure of the scientific collaboration community and identify its active authors. This will allow them to quickly decide on emerging issues, trends, and key scientists. The results of this study will also play an important role in future policy-making in knowledge organization and will provide better insight into the authors and co-authorship network in this field. In light of the above, this paper examines the co-authorship structure of Persian knowledge organization articles using centrality indices.

Literature Review

As mentioned, scientometrics can provide a clear view of the changes in the field under study and can be of great help in this regard. Various studies have been published on various topics with the focus of examining co-authorship networks. In this section, due to the large number of published studies, a list of some of them will be presented. The first group examines national or regional co-authorship collaborations. For example, Hong and Hwang (2017) examined co-authorship networks of faculty and students in humanities and social sciences journals in South Korea. In the second category, researchers have examined the extent of scientific collaboration between universities, centers, and institutions at the national and international levels. Fujita et al. (2018) also examined co-authorship networks in physics and biology in organizational research. The third group of co-authorship studies is related to scientific collaborations in a specific subject area. In this type of research, the extent of national and international collaboration of researchers in a specific subject area or discipline at the national and international levels has been examined. Gonzalez-Valente, Santos, and Arencibia (2019) also examined the social structure of co-authorship in knowledge management in their study. Fan, Li, and Lu (2020) also examined co-authorship networks in the tourism industry. The fourth group of co-authorship studies examines the extent of scientific collaborations within a specific journal or journals. Kim et al. (2017) examined the co-authorship network of articles in the Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Zheng et al. (2017) examined the co-authorship network of the Annals of the American Geographical Society.

Methodology

This research is an applied type that has been done with the approach of scientometrics and analysis of social networks. The research data were selected from 106 keywords of his knowledge organization in the title field, which were selected after consultation with subject matter experts in this field; Together with all the articles published in selected journals of information science and epistemology indexed in the Islamic World Science Citation Center from 1378 to 1398. Finally, the retrieved records were limited to research papers, conference papers, and review papers and limited to the subject of the Library and Information field. Out of 1482 authors who were involved in the publication of 1410 articles, 168 with at least 4 articles were analyzed using UCINET software. After that, a square matrix of dimensions 168 by 168 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

Results indicated that the average number of authors per article is 1.05. Analysis of data related to co-authorship analysis indicates the two-author approach as the most common approach in knowledge organization (35.17%), and the three-author approach (26.80%) is in the next rank. Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi (56 articles), Dr. Morteza Kokabi (44 articles) and Dr. Yaghoub Norouzi (39 articles) have the highest number of articles in knowledge organization, respectively. Also, the co-authorship of Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi and Dr. Mehri Parirokh (10 articles) won the top rank. In the study of centrality indicators, Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi gained the top scores in the Degree Centrality, Closeness Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Eigen vector, respectively.

Discussion

Results indicated that the average number of authors per article is 1.05. Analysis of data related to co-authorship analysis indicates the two-author approach as the most common approach in knowledge organization (35.17%), and the three-author approach (26.80%) is in the next rank. Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi (56 articles), Dr. Morteza Kokabi (44 articles), and Dr. Yaghoub Norouzi (39 articles) have the highest number of articles in knowledge organization, respectively. Also, the co-authorship of Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi and Dr. Mehri Parirokh (10 articles) won the top rank. In the study of centrality indicators, Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi gained the top scores in the Degree Centrality, Closeness Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Eigen vector, respectively.

Conclusion

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.

Keywords

• Knowledge Organization
• Co-Authorship
• Centrality Indicators
• Social Network Analysis (SNA)

Main Subjects

• Information and Knowledge Management