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Intellectual and social similarity among scholarly journals. An exploratory comparison of the networks of editors, authors and co-citations
Alberto Baccini, Lucio Barabesi, Yves Gingras, Mahdi Kelfaoui

Last modified: 2019-06-14

Abstract


This paper explores by using suitable quantitative techniques, whether the intellectualproximity among scholarly journals is also a proximity in terms of social communitiesgathered around the journals. We considered three fields: statistics, economics and informationand library sciences. For representing the intellectual proximity among journalswe have used the cocitation networks (CC). For having information about the academiccommunities around journals, we have considered the networks of journals generated byauthors writing in more than one journal (interlocking authorship: IA) as well as thenetworks generated by scholars sitting in the editorial board of more than one journal (interlocking editorship: IE). As a first step we the whole structure of the networks isanalyzed on the basis of dissimilarity matrices. The CC, IE and IA networks appear tobe associated for all the three considered fields. Then the IE, IA and CC networks arepartitioned in communities and the degree of association among the detected communitiesare evaluated. The communities detected in the three networks are not independentfor all the research fields considered. Overall, these results shows that the intellectualproximity is also a proximity among authors and, more surprisingly, among editors of thejournals. The map of editorial power, the map of intellectual proximity and the map ofauthor communities thus tell very similar stories.

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