Social Network Analysis in Information Science: research from the Web of Science

Abstract

Introduction: analyze the international scenario of scientific publication on the topic of Social Network Analysis in journals in the area of Library Science and Information Science, indexed in the Web of Science. Method: quantitative and qualitative approach, using bibliometric and scientometric indicators, and can be characterized as descriptive. Results: 570 valid articles were retrieved, made available between 1994 and 2019. The retrieved production was published in 94 different scientific journals, highlighting the “Scientometrics”, which alone published 23.86% of all studies, thus becoming the main source research for the exploration of the studied theme. Of the authorships, 1,339 different researchers were identified, a result apparently aligned with the number of co-authored partnerships, about 85.79% of the total result. Price’s Elitism law was used to determine the elite of the studied area, corresponding to 1/3 of the authors, that is, the first 38 authors who published at least three articles related to the theme. Related to Zipf’s law, the keywords commonly attributed by researchers are linked to studies developed in the discipline of Metric Information Studies. It was also found that 19,933 bibliographic references were used in the publications, and the ten most frequent references are, for the most part, of a conceptual and methodological basis expanded to all areas of knowledge. Conclusions: it was possible to identify, among other aspects, that the theme has been developed in the area in recent years and is commonly associated with metric studies of information.