Fragmented Romanian Sociology: Growth and Structure of the Collaboration Network

Abstract

Structural patterns in collaboration networks are essential for understanding how new ideas, research practices, innovation or cooperation circulate and develop within academic communities and between and within university departments. In our research, we explore and investigate the structure of the collaboration network formed by the academics working full-time within all the 17 sociology departments across Romania. We show that the collaboration network is sparse and fragmented, and that it constitutes an environment that does not promote the circulation of new ideas and innovation within the field. Although recent years have witnessed an increase in the productivity of Romanian sociologists, there is still ample room for improvement in terms of the interaction infrastructure that ought to link individuals together so that they could maximize their potentials. We also fail to discern evidence in favor of the Matthew effect governing the growth of the network, which suggests scientific success and productivity are not rewarded. Instead, the structural properties of the collaboration network are partly those of a core-periphery network, where the spread of innovation and change can be explained by structural equivalence rather than by interpersonal influence models. We also provide support for the idea that, within the observed network, collaboration is the product of homophily rather than prestige effects. Further research on the subject based on data from other countries in the region is needed to place our results in a comparative framework, in particular to discern whether the behavior of the Romanian sociologist community is unique or rather common.

Polarization in the social sciences: Assortative mixing in social science collaboration networks is resilient to interventions

“…Existing research on co-authorship networks tends to focus on STEM fields because data on journal publications are easily available from electronic databases [25,26,27,28]. Social science co-authorship network studies are therefore relatively rare (but see [23,29,30,31,32]), and those analyses that do exist are often biased in favor of journal articles because they, too, draw on journal publication databases. This practice yields a biased image of the scientific collaboration patterns of some disciplines like the social sciences and humanities, where journal publications are only one part of the picture [19,20].…”

Collaboration patterns in the German political science co-authorship network

“…Furthermore, and in line with the findings of Plümper [33] as outlined above, political science institutes vary strongly in their international visibility. In the neighboring discipline of sociology, co-authorship networks were recently investigated in Romania [39] as well as in Poland, Romania and Slovenia [40]. …”

Who is researching biodiversity hotspots in Eastern Europe? A case study on grasslands from Romania

“…Collaboration between academics and knowledge creation have been extensively studied using network analysis framework. Analyses span from understanding of patterns of scientific collaboration as resulted from co-authorship and institutional networks (Newman 2004, Hancean et al 2014, Hancean and Perc 2016) to knowledge creation (Wang 2016), to prediction of productivity (Barabási et al 2002) or trends (Chen et al 2010). In this paper we use network analysis, to characterize the status of scientific research in the field of grassland governance in Romania and suggests ways to improve scientific performance by: 1) revealing internationally visible research around Romania’s grasslands published after 1990; 2) highlighting most important institutions generating the research, and mapping the invisible authors and academic leaders as resulted from the co-authorship network, and 3) analyzing the co-occurrence keyword network to discover the most common keywords, research topics, and scientific interest.…”