Social Network Analysis and Academic Performance of the Editorial Board Members for Journals of Library and Information Science

Abstract

The editors of journal are the gatekeepers to hold the quality and direction of journal. Normally the editors of the journal are served as the “academic authority” in the corresponding discipline. Due to the limitation of the academic authority, it's common that one expert takes the editor for many journals, which is called the interlocking editorship phenomenon. Base on this, we firstly built a social network matrix of the editorial board members about CSSCI journals of Library and Information Science. After that, we utilized the K-cores analysis of SNA to separate the network structure and to find the core subgroup, used the centrality analysis to verify the core of the core subgroup nodes. Secondly, we counted the number of published papers in the past five years, the total cites and total downloads about this papers, and H index of total editorial board members. All of this data of bibliometrics reflects the academic performance of the editorial board member in the past five years. And then we proofed the academic quality of journals through the data. At last, we discussed some problems which exist in the current regime.