Inquiry on two decade studies in the scientific community of digital libraries in Iran: small-world phenomenon

Purpose of the present paper was to identify prolific and influential researchers in digital library domain in Iran. It tries to determine the extent of research collaborations of the scientific community of Iranian digital libraries (DLs) domain in scientific conferences and journals.
This is a scientometrics applied study. In this regard, Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods were used to analyze and visualize the co-authorship structure. The statistical population of this research includes all researchers affiliated with Iranian institutions which wrote at least one Persian or English languages paper up to 2016 in the DLs domain. Microsoft Excel, RavarMatrix and UCINet softwares has been utilized to analyze the collected data. Also, NodeXL and VOSviewer softwares were applied in order to mapping the co-authorship networks.
Findings: Researchers productivity is not in agreement with Lotka's Law; In addition, the findings showed international collaboration that the low level and dominant authorship pattern in DLs domain papers is a two-author model. Overall and by taking into account the average rating of all scientific production and SNA indicators, respectively Mehdi Alipour-hafezi, Yaghoub Norouzi, Saeed Rezaei Sharifabadi are Iranian key actors in the DLs domain.
Co-authorship network of DLs domain in Iran, seems to exhibit “scale-free” network properties and the very low density of the network also indicates the inadequate maturity of the researcher's social structure; However, still the Milgram's six degrees of separation theory is verificatied about this community and the utilization of the term “small world network” it's permissible.