Visualizing the co-authership network of Persian journals in sports science at the University of Tehran

The current study aims at visualizing the co-authorship network of the authors of the articles published in Farsi in the fields of sports medicine, growth and motor learning, sports biosciences and sport management at the University of Tehran, as well as identifying the most influential authors, the co-authorship pattern, and network integrity.
Metodology: The study is scientometric and uses a social network analysis approach as well as social network analysis indicators such as cooperation level, cooperation index, node size, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and specific vector centrality, clustering coefficient and the like. NodeXL software is used for data analysis. Articles published between March 21, 2011 and March 21, 2016 (5-year period) are considered here. 581 papers were published by 1890 authors during the 5-year period.
Findins: Among 581 Papers, 562 papers were co-authored, according to the analysis. Moreover, 2816 bidirectional relations were observed among all the authors in the journals under study. Among the investigated journals, the highest cooperation index and cooperation level go to Journal of Sport Biosciences and Journal of Sport Medicine, respectively.
Among the authors, Ali Asghar Ravasi, Mohammad Reza Kordi, Abbasali Gaeini, Mehrzad Hamidi, Rahman Souri, and Abolfazl Farahani stand out as the most prominent authors with the highest number of papers published in the studied journals during the 5-year period