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

TL;DR

This study analyzes the NKOS community's research output from 2000 to 2016, examining its network structure and gender-based collaboration patterns using bibliometric and network analysis methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive network analysis of NKOS research collaborations and reveals gender-based differences in collaboration behaviors and homophily.

Findings

Women show higher homophily in collaborations.

The network exhibits small differences in closeness and clustering by gender.

Authors tend to collaborate within the same institution or geographic area.

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 to 2016 from a network analytical perspective. We focus on the papers presented at the European and U.S. 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.