How Do Educational Researchers Organize Their Work? A Social Network Analysis on Co-authorship Relations

Abstract

Social network analysis brings new perspectives to the study of social phenomena. Traditional sociological analysis is usually focused on the categorization of data. By contrast, social network analysis is focused on relations, aiming to describe the structure of relational ties. This case study will provide an example of the use of social network analysis to portray and understand how educational researchers organize their work. The research took as its starting point the evidence that, on a transnational scale, researchers are requested to produce more published, internationalized, competitive, and applied knowledge. Thus, I was interested in capturing possible effects of these trends in researchers’ work. For this purpose, I conducted a social network analysis exercise based on co-authorship relations to find networks of researchers, whose configurations and features helped to understand how they organize their work to meet (or not meet) the new demands they are confronted with.

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