Analyzing the structure of the EGOV conference community

Abstract

The paper applies social network analysis techniques to the task of analysis the dynamics and structure of the e-government research community. From the bibliographic data about papers published in the proceedings of this conference (International Conference on e-Government), we build a co-authorship network representing collaboration patterns among community members in the period from 2005 to 2009. The co-authorship network analysis helps us identify the most productive and central authors in EGR community, as well as delineate the community structures through finding its sub-groups and core parts. In this way, several sub-communities are revealed in sense of the thematic topics, affiliations, and geographical origins of authors. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.