Social networks and intellectual Administration information: a scientometric analysis of the period 1997-2006

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the social and intellectual networks in the Information Management field, trying to understand how social networks determine how knowledge is built in the area. Having the bibliometric data from all papers published in the proceedings of Enanpad (the major yearly management academic conference in Brazil) over the period from 1997 to 2006 as a starting point, scientometric analyses were developed about the academic profile of the information management field. Information on authorship was extracted from each paper, in order to draw co-authorship networks, and on the references that were adopted, from which co-citation networks were generated. 339 papers were included in the study, involving 9287 references that were analyzed using UCINET 6 and PAJEK 1.22 software. The authorship network was noticed still to be very fragmented, with researchers from the main graduate schools in the field leading the structuring of the area. The co-citation network allowed depicting what is main stream in the area and topics that are becoming more relevant to researchers in recent years. This contributes to the understanding of the Information Management area’s intellectual structure. In addition, it became clear that the social relationships among researchers influence their intellectual preferences at an individual level. This influence becomes noticeable even at a clusters level (network components) in the second period of analysis (2002-2006).