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Co-authorship among the Fellows of the International Communication Association

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Abstract

This study employs social network analysis to describe the structure of collaboration among Fellows of the International Communication Association (ICA), an elite group of social scientists, using co-authorship data gathered from Google Scholar. Network analysis revealed that fellows were loosely connected, consistent with past research on elite scholars. Although the association is “international,” over 80% of its members were educated and over 75% were most recently employed in the United States. However, North America did not significantly predict network centrality. No differences in network centrality were observed based on the status of being a former ICA President. Males tended to be slightly more central than females. Unlike for the ICA membership as a whole, Fellows were not differentiated into separate research communities. Furthermore, Fellows have conducted little international collaboration. These results are discussed in terms of the prior literature and its shortcomings.

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Acknowledgement

An earlier draft of this manuscript was presented virtually to the International Communication Association, Paris, in May 2022. The authors would like to thank Hwa-Yong Song, Ji-Hun Son, Jae-Hun Kim, and Rishabh Bhaskaran for their data collection and database organization and Jeanette B. Ruiz for her assistance in data analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Davis, Davis, USA

    George A. Barnett

  2. YeungNam University, Gyeongsan, Republic of Korea

    Han Woo Park

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Correspondence to Han Woo Park.

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Barnett, G.A., Park, H.W. Co-authorship among the Fellows of the International Communication Association. Scientometrics 128, 3401–3418 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04705-6

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