Analyzing the Academic Social Networks of Knowledge Network Field: relations, trends and clusters

 Analyzing the Academic social networks of Knowledge Network field for drawing the intellectual and conceptual structure of this field.

Design/ Methodology/ Approach:

 This research is applied research that has been done by academic social network analysis. performance analysis and science mapping methods are used to perform this research. in performance analysis, the index of frequency of citations was used and for science mapping uses Co-citation, Bibliographic coupling and Co-occurrence of keywords. We use VOSviewer for analyzing data. In this research, 1748 Article, Book chapter and Review of Knowledge Network field that indexed before 2021 in Web of Science Core Collection were analyzed.

In addition to a comprehensive discussion on the concept of knowledge network, highlighting the relationship between knowledge network and other concepts, identifying research trends, and introducing significant works and resources in this field, the intellectual structure of knowledge network field was also drawn.

Limitations & Consequences: 

The low presence of Iranian publications in the Web of Science database is a limitation of this research. This limitation makes it impossible to drawing the intellectual and conceptual structure of the university social network within the country.

Practical Consequences:

 Knowledge Network has been applied in many areas and according to its role in Innovation, knowledge sharing, collaboration promotion, technology transfer, and etc. more attention to this field are needed. This study is a good guide for this purpose.

Innovation or value of the Article: 

According to searches, this article is the first research that has drawn the intellectual and conceptual structure of the Knowledge Network field.