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Analyzing the network structure and gender differences among the members of the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) community

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Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a major part of the research output of the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) community in the period 2000–2016 from a network analytical perspective. We focus on the papers presented at the European and US NKOS workshops and in addition four special issues on NKOS in the last 16 years. For this purpose, we have generated an open dataset, the “NKOS bibliography” which covers the bibliographic information of the research output. We analyze the co-authorship network of this community which results in 123 papers with a sum of 256 distinct authors. We use standard network analytic measures such as degree, betweenness and closeness centrality to describe the co-authorship network of the NKOS dataset. First, we investigate global properties of the network over time. Second, we analyze the centrality of the authors in the NKOS network. Lastly, we investigate gender differences in collaboration behavior in this community. Our results show that apart from differences in centrality measures of the scholars, they have higher tendency to collaborate with those in the same institution or the same geographic proximity. We also find that homophily is higher among women in this community. Apart from small differences in closeness and clustering among men and women, we do not find any significant dissimilarities with respect to other centralities.

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Notes

  1. For an introduction of KOS and NKOS and recent applications see [8, 14].

  2. Comprehensive review articles on KOS and NKOS topics were published in [9, 26].

  3. The NKOS workshop bibliography is maintained in the following repository: https://github.com/PhilippMayr/NKOS-bibliography.

  4. The data for this subset are available under https://github.com/PhilippMayr/NKOS-bibliography/tree/master/publications/ijdl17.

  5. Traugott Koch was a central protagonist and networker of the US and European NKOS community. He retired and left the NKOS community in 2012.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleague Marcia Lei Zeng (Kent State University) who provided us with internal information about the US NKOS workshops. This work was partly funded by DFG, Grant No. SU 647/19-1; the “Opening Scholarly Communication in the Social Sciences” (OSCOSS) project at GESIS.

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Karimi, F., Mayr, P. & Momeni, F. Analyzing the network structure and gender differences among the members of the Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) community. Int J Digit Libr 20, 231–239 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-018-0243-0

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