Patterns of Iranian co-authorship networks in social sciences: A comparative study

Collaboration in science is a process in which two or more authors share their ideas, resources and data to create a joint work. This research compares coauthorship networks of Iranian articles in library and information science (LIS), psychology (PSY), management (MNG), and economics (ECO) in the ISI Web of Knowledge database during 2000-2009, and uses network analysis for the visualization of coauthorship networks. Data include all articles with at least one Iranian author and indexed in ISI's Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the fields of US, PSY, MNG, and ECO. Indicators such as the Collaborative Index (CI), Degree of Collaboration (DC) and Collaboration Coefficient (CC) were calculated for each discipline. Results show that two or three authors were the most common number of authors per paper, and authors of PSY tended to have more multi-authored articles, compared to the other disciplines. LIS had the lowest rank regarding CC. MNG had the densest coauthorship network. and PSY had the sparsest. Iranian authors in the field of PSY mostly collaborated with those in the U.S.. while LIS and MNG authors tended to collaborate with U.K. authors, and ECO authors tended to collaborate with Canadians. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.