Abstract—This paper studies the role of world countries in Library and Information Science research during 1963 to 2012 using scientometric and social network analysis (SNA) approaches. A total of 58757 papers which published by 83 Information Science and Library Science journals in JCR 2013 and indexed in the Web of Science were selected as the sample of the study. In this paper, the overall structure and evolution of the collaboration network of countries were investigated using macro-level SNA metrics. UCINET and VOSVIEWER software were utilized for data analysis and visualization. Findings of the study show that the co-authorship network of countries in LIS research contains 151 vertices which connected together through 3121 links (co-authorships). The collaboration network of countries seems to exhibit “scale-free” and “small world” network properties and the famous notion of “six degrees of separation” is valid in this network. The co-authorship network of countries consists of 15 components, the largest of which contains 137 vertices, yielded a ratio of 90% of the whole network. Moreover, the results of clustering analysis show that this network comprises 39 clusters. Amongst them, the eleventh and ninth clusters which contain US and UK, have the highest density.

Index Terms—library and information science, scientometrics, social network analysis, countries collaboration network

Cite: Mohammadamin Erfanmanesh and Elaheh Hosseini, "Using Social Network Analysis Method to Visualize Library & Information Science Research," Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 177-181, August, 2016. doi: 10.12720/jait.7.3.177-181