Poster Board Number: 49
Title: Enhancing Library Services: Utilizing Bibliographic Databases for Social Network Analysis
Objective: Social network analysis has emerged as an important method for understanding research efforts and can play a role in helping to shape an institution's strategic direction and evaluating research programs. This project aims to utilize traditional bibliographic resources in developing value-added services such as social network analysis for an institution, department, or specialized research center.
Methods: Forty faculty from the University of Florida's Genetics Institute were selected for social network analysis, based on their academic standing (20 assistant and associate professors and 20 full professors). A literature search was carried out in both Scopus and Web of Science for each group of faculty (both junior and more experienced faculty). The bibliographic data from the literature search was downloaded and subsequently used to create a network to compare collaborations, evidenced by coauthorship on papers. The social network analysis was carried out using the Network Workbench Tool (NWB) from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, a freely available social network analysis platform, which is downloadable from the web.
Conclusions: Coauthorship networks can be an insightful and visually stunning approach to better understand collaboration efforts by academic authors. The NWB software provides both a visualization of the coauthorship patterns as well as quantitative metrics to describe the network. In this case, the different network visualizations allow viewers to understand differences in collaboration patterns between the two groups of faculty. Because the data used for this type of analysis are widely available through library subscriptions and because library staff have expertise in navigating these bibliographic databases, this type of analysis is an ideal service to offer through the library.
Authors: Kristi L. Holmes, Bioinformaticist, Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO; Michele R. Tennant, AHIP, Assistant Director, Biomedical and Health Information Services, and Bioinformatics Librarian, Health Science Center Libraries and UF Genetics Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
