Research On Co-Authorship Network In The Field Of Management Information Systmes

As the development of science and technology, and the deepening of research, it is difficult for individual to complete a research topic or thesis. Research cooperation has become more frequent in large scientific times, the phenomenon of co-authorship and the co-size are common increasingly when reflected in academic performance. Past research about academic collaboration has focused on the cooperation in the field of natural science, research on management is seldom, and it is even less as to management information system(MIS). Howerer, MIS is a relatively new cross-disipline, which is the cross combination of computer science, management science and behavioral science. Many academic papers in MIS field are completed by several authors, the phenomena rarely appears that a paper has just one author. How do people in this fied cooperate with each other? We still lack of data and in-depth analysis.Existing research about co-authorship network including authors'cooperation model, analysis of some field's development and evolution basing on co-authorship network, structural analysis of co-authorship network and so on. Moreover, most of these studies applied the centrality of Freeman, Brin and Page to analyze authors'centraltiy. Among them, Freeman's degree centrality, closeness and betweeness are referred most commonly. Howerver, degree centrality only denotes one author's number of partners. Obviously, apart from the number of partners, there are other characteristics that could reflect authors'level of activity. One of the more important features is the author's extensity of partnership which is proposed by Lu Hai yang. His research achivement pubished in"Scientometrics"in 2009, which is searched by SCI and the impact factor is 2.328. Howerver, the concept and method are relaltively new, and they have not been used in past researches about co-authorship network.Based on these considerations, this paper chooses the top three journals in MIS field in SCI database as the sample, which are MIS Quaterly(MISQ), Management Science(MS), Journal of Management Information System(JMIS). We download correlative information of articles between the year 2000 and 2008, the number of paper is 1563 and the number of authors is 2611, and we consturcted MIS co-authorship network on the basis. First of all, we did basic statistcal analysis and component anaylsis to the data, and made visual diagram as well. Then, we measured authors'classic centrality in the co-authorship network, computed authors'degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweeness centraltiy, and made correlation analysis.Nextly, based on the concept and calculation method of extensity centraltiy that proposed by Lu Hai yang, we measured authors'extensity centrality in MIS co-authorship network. In addition, we analyzed the correlation between extensity centraltiy and classic centraltiy.Finally, based on the calculation results of extensity centrality, we surveyed and analyzed authors'backgrounds, proved the practical significance of evaluating scholars by extensity centrality. Also, we analyzed the core author'country, insitution and research directions. The University of Duke, the University of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota and so on are all acitive insititutions in the field of MIS. These are of positive meaning for researchers in MIS field to grasp the focal point and hotspot of this field, to select appropriate partners and so on.