Evolutionary analysis of international collaboration network of Chinese scholars in management research

Abstract

Taking articles written by mainland China scholars from management related 258 journals indexed by Web of Science database as the data sets, this paper analyses the output of scientific research of Chinese scholars. It studies the structure, characteristics and development trend of collaboration network of Chinese scholars in management research area through scientometrics and social network analysis approaches. We found that the accumulated number of Chinese authors and the accumulated number of articles published by Chinese authors in the 258 journals increases by exponential form, most of which focus on Operations research & Management science. About half of the articles come up through international collaboration and the accumulated number of articles written through collaboration between Chinese and overseas scholars display an exponential increase. The evolution studies of the collaboration network indicate that the collaboration of Chinese scholars in the field of management is on a sharp rise. However, the collaboration network has not yet stepped into a mature and steady stage. Nonetheless, a tendency towards the stable stage is unveiled.