Network analysis of collaboration in the leading hungarian educational journals The co-authorship network

Abstract

This study reports the analysis of the aggregated co-authorship network of authors (n=4248), who published articles (n=8053) in leading Hungarian educational journals (n=4) between 1991 and 2016. The aim of the study was to analyze the structure of the professional authoring network. The analysis focused on network properties. Besides the basic scientometric properties (authorship patterns of authors and publications), we investigated the small-world phenomena (the average path length between authors, the longest shortest path in the network and the local density of authors – clustering coefficient), the connectedness/fragmentation of the network and the distribution pattern of the number of authors in the connected subnetworks. Results showed that only 13 percent of the sample were co-authored. In addition, 63 percent of the authors never produced articles with co-authors. As for the trends, the analysis showed that co-authorship grew in the sample, while the amount and the proportion of single-authored publications decreased over the investigated time period. The number of single authors showed a similar tendency, whereas co-authorship increased. As for the subnetwork structure, the network had many isolated co-authorship components (n=412) that exhibited power law distribution (α=3,24, p=0,69). There was one giant subnetwork (n=366), some subnetworks with few authors, many author pairs and three-member authorship formations. The giant subnetwork was small, only 9 percent of the authors belonged to it. Overall, co-authorship did exist in the authorship network and showed an increasing trend, however, it was not widespread. The article discusses some important implications of the findings.