Social network analysis as a metric for the development of an interdisciplinary, inter-organizational research team

The development of an interdisciplinary and inter-organizational research team among eight of Canada's leading emergency, geriatric medicine and rehabilitation researchers affiliated with six academic centers has provided an opportunity to study the development of a distributed team of interdisciplinary researchers using the methods of social network theory and analysis and to consider whether these methods are useful tools in the science of team science. Using traditional network analytic methods, the team of investigators were asked to rate their relationships with one another retrospectively at one year prior to the team's first meeting and contemporaneously at two subsequent yearly intervals. Using network analytic statistics and visualizations the data collected finds an increase in network density and reciprocity of relationships together with more distributed centrality consistent with the findings of other researchers. These network development characteristics suggest that the distributed research team is developing as it should and supports the assertion that network analysis is a useful science of team science research tool.