Abstract

During the 1990s, one of us developed a series of freeware routines (http://www.leydesdorff.net/indicators) that enable the user to organize downloads from the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) into a relational database, and then to export matrices for further analysis in various formats (for example, for co-author analysis). The basic format of the matrices displays each document as a case in a row that can be attributed different variables in the columns. One limitation to this approach was hitherto that relational databases typically have an upper limit for the number of variables, such as 256 or 1024. In this brief communication we report on a way to circumvent this limitation by using txt2Pajek.exe, available as freeware from http://www.pfeffer.at/txt2pajek

Abstract

This paper studies the social structure of Spanish and Latin American communication researchers through the representation and analysis of three coauthorship networks at the national, institutional, and individual level. Such networks are built from papers indexed in the ‘Communication’ category by Web of Science and published between 2000 and 2019 by authors attached to a Spanish or Latin American institution (n = 5,040). The goal is to characterize the structural features of each network, identify the most central actors, and illustrate the most relevant relationships among nodes. The results show that the most central country is Spain, followed by the USA and other European nations. Among the Latin American states, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico are placed at the most relevant nodes. Latin American collaboration is preferentially addressed to the USA, especially since 2015. Regarding institutions, Spanish public universities in Madrid and Catalonia achieve the highest degrees of centrality. However, the most central Latin American institutions are private universities. The most relevant authors are Spanish researchers until 2015, when they are replaced at the top by Latin American scholars. Collaboration at both the individual and institutional levels shows a deep regional tendency, while the internationalization of researchers and universities is only more visible since 2015. This work identifies a tendency towards internal cohesion at different network levels as the number of connected nodes grows in each period. We conclude that a proper Spanish-Latin America community of communication researchers does not exist.