Social network analysis and data visualization of MIS international collaboration in Taiwan
ISSN: 0737-8831
Article publication date: 15 March 2021
Issue publication date: 22 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to apply social network analysis (SNA) to study faculty research productivity, to identify key leaders, to study publication keywords and research areas and to visualize international collaboration patterns and analyze collaboration research fields from all Management Information System (MIS) departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors first retrieved results encompassing about 1,766 MIS professors and their publication records between 1982 and 2015 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) website. Next, the authors merged these publication records with the records obtained from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Airiti Library and Springer Link databases. The authors further applied six network centrality equations, leadership index, exponential weighted moving average (EWMA), contribution value and k-means clustering algorithms to analyze the collaboration patterns, research productivity and publication patterns. Finally, the authors applied D3.js to visualize the faculty members' international collaborations from all MIS departments in Taiwan.
Findings
The authors have first identified important scholars or leaders in the network. The authors also see that most MIS scholars in Taiwan tend to publish their papers in the journals such as Decision Support Systems and Information and Management. The authors have further figured out the significant scholars who have actively collaborated with academics in other countries. Furthermore, the authors have recognized the universities that have frequent collaboration with other international universities. The United States, China, Canada and the United Kingdom are the countries that have the highest numbers of collaborations with Taiwanese academics. Lastly, the keywords model, system and algorithm were the most common terms used in recent years.
Originality/value
This study applied SNA to visualize international research collaboration patterns and has revealed some salient characteristics of international cooperation trends and patterns, leadership networks and influences and research productivity for faculty in Information Management departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015. In addition, the authors have discovered the most common keywords used in recent years.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by MOST 106-2410-H-194-027-MY2 and MOST 108-2410-H-009-057 of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Citation
Chuang, Y.-T. and Chen, Y.-H. (2022), "Social network analysis and data visualization of MIS international collaboration in Taiwan", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 40 No. 5, pp. 1422-1458. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-08-2020-0186
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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