Social Network Analysis of Iranian Researchers in the Field of Violence Publisher Pubmed



Salamati P¹ ; Soheili F² Show Affiliations
Source: Chinese Journal of Traumatology - English Edition Published:2016

Abstract

Purpose The social network analysis (SNA) is a paradigm for analyzing structural patterns in social relations, testing knowledge sharing process and identifying bottlenecks of information flow. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of research in the field of violence in Iran using SNA. Methods Research population included all the papers with at least one Iranian affiliation published in violence field indexed in SCIE, PubMed and Scopus databases. The co-word maps, co-authorship network and structural holes were drawn using related software. In the next step, the active authors and some measures of our network including degree centrality (DC), closeness, eigenvector, betweeness, density, diameter, compactness and size of the main component were assessed. Likewise, the trend of the published articles was evaluated based on the number of documents and their citations from 1972 to 2014. Results Five hundred and seventy one records were obtained. The five main clusters and hot spots were mental health, violence, war, psychiatric disorders and suicide. The co-authorship network was complex, tangled and scale free. The top nine authors with cut point role and top ten active authors were identified. The mean (standard deviation) of normalized DC, closeness, eigenvector and betweeness were 0.449 (0.805), 0.609 (0.214), 2.373 (7.353) and 0.338 (1.122), respectively. The density, diameter and mean compactness of our co-authorship network were 0.0494, 3.955 and 0.125, respectively. The main component consisted of 216 nodes that formed 17% of total size of the network. Both the number of the documents and their citations has increased in the field of violence in the recent years. Conclusion Although the number of the documents has recently increased in the field of violence, the information flow is slow and there are not many relations among the authors in the network. However, the active authors have ability to influence the flow of knowledge within the network. © 2016 Daping Hospital and the Research Institute of Surgery of the Third Military Medical University