Do prestige and trust sustain knowledge-based communities? Evidence from Medical Ethics co-authorship networks in France

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify embedded communities among Medical Ethics scholars in France based on their position and strength of association in the social networks they form. Design/methodology/approach The author constructed a co-authorship network by linking two authors if they co-authored a paper. Once the co-authorship network was constructed, the author investigated the entire network quantitatively using standard research methods known as social network analysis. The author’s mechanism of community detection was via identification, i.e. communities were user-defined based on topological analysis. Findings The study identified that communities formed by trust (bonding or repeat connections) or by prestige (connection of well-connected scholars with those that are already well-connected) overlap each other, suggesting that trust and prestige may go hand in hand in sustaining communities. Structural holes within trust networks indicated that some actors played more of a broker role than did other actors. Research limitations/implications The study uses Web of Science field based category to extract data. Although thorough cleaning of data has been performed, author disambiguation over a three decade period remains a limitation. Originality/value Although there have been numerous studies on mapping co-authorship networks, there has been limited work investigating the underlying communities formed by author associations. The results of this study should be of immense benefit to those studying the science of science and S&T policy.