Exploring Vietnamese co-authorship patterns in social sciences with basic network measures of 2008-2017 Scopus data

Abstract

Background: Collaboration is a common occurrence among Vietnamese scientists; however, insights into Vietnamese scientific collaborations have been scarce. On the other hand, the application of social network analysis in studying science collaboration has gained much attention all over the world. The technique could be employed to explore Vietnam’s scientific community. Methods: This paper employs network theory to explore characteristics of a network of 412 Vietnamese social scientists whose papers can be found indexed in the Scopus database. Two basic network measures, density and clustering coefficient, were taken, and the entire network was studied in comparison with two of its largest components. Results: The networks connections are very sparse, with a density of only 0.47%, while the clustering coefficient is very high (58.64%). This suggests an inefficient dissemination of information, knowledge, and expertise in the network. Secondly, the disparity in levels of connection among individuals indicates that the network would easily fall apart if a few highly-connected nodes are removed. Finally, the two largest components of the network were found to differ from the entire networks in terms of measures and were both led by the most productive and well-connected researchers. Conclusions: High clustering and low density seems to be tied to inefficient dissemination of expertise among Vietnamese social scientists, and consequently low scientific output. Also low in robustness, the network shows the potential of an intellectual elite composed of well-connected, productive, and socially significant individuals.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Is Economics the fairest of Vietnamese social sciences and humanities?

“…Moreover, even among scientists who have published in indexed international journals, there have been signs of its low sustainability, such as the lack of information distribution in the co-authorship network, or a high level of reliance on a few highly connected members in the networks (Ho et al, 2017). Results suggested that only specific groups such as first-authorship and seniority (age 40 -50) appeared to have crucial contributions in the community (Vuong et al, 2017;Vuong et al, 2018).…”

“…Fortunately, the establishment of NAFOSTED in 2008, followed by two new policies in 2014 and 2017 ( Figure 1), appeared to trigger positive changes in terms of research output of SSH (Ho et al, 2017). The number of ISI-indexed publications from Vietnam thus has been rising five times since 2009 (Adams et al, 2019).…”

Giá trị công ích của bình duyệt khoa học

“…Sự ra đời của tạp chí mở hoàn toàn F1000Research cách đây vài năm phản ánh xu hướng đó. Đã có một số tác giả Việt Nam công bố trên tạp chí này và người đọc có thể xem đầy đủ biên bản phản biện và trả lời của các tác giả [4,5] . Xu hướng này mang đến những giá trị mới cho công ích khoa học và giúp việc đánh giá uy tín học thuật toàn diện hơn về mọi mặt.…”

Nemo Solus Satis Sapit: Trends of Research Collaborations in the Vietnamese Social Sciences, Observing 2008–2017 Scopus Data

“…To support this, future centers of excellence at universities that aim to support quality research should consider promoting collaborative research operations, where senior and prolific researchers, as project leaders, would also serve as mentors and in-house reviewers to novice researchers [58][59][60].…”