Co-authorship Networks and Scholarly Books: A Methodological Approach from a University Press Case Study
| Autor | Adolfo A. Abadía |
| Cargo | Political Scientist and Master's in Social and Political Studies from Universidad Icesi (Colombia). Junior researcher, member of the Nexus group (A1-Minciencias) at the same University. Email: aaabadia@icesi.edu.co / adolfoabadia@yahoo.es |
| Páginas | 101-140 |
Revista CS 40
Adolfo A. AbadíaI
https://doi.org/10.18046/recs.i40.5858
Cómo citar:
Revista CS
This article contributes to bibliometric studies of scholarly book publishing by show-
ing the co-authorship networks in the case of a university press. It uses social network analysis
attributes associated with integrity and centrality metrics to, on the one hand, characterize the
interaction in the network as a whole, and on the other hand, to identify the authors who play
an important role within it. For this purpose, a database with 989 authors was built, it structures
a network of 9656 links between co-authors distributed in 188 books published between 2007
and 2021 by Editorial Universidad Icesi. The main results are of two types:
Este artículo aporta al estudio bibliométrico de la producción académica de libros
mostrando la configuración de redes de coautorías en el caso de una editorial universitaria.
Recurre a atributos del análisis de redes sociales asociados a las métricas de integridad y cen-
tralidad para, por un lado, caracterizar el nivel de interacción de la red, y por el otro, identificar
a los autores que juegan un rol importante al interior de ella. Para lograr esto, se construyó
una base de datos con 989 autores distribuidos en 188 libros publicados entre 2007 y 2021 por
Revista CS 40
la Editorial Universidad Icesi, y se estructuró una red de 9656 vínculos entre coautores. Sus
principales resultados son de dos tipos:
University presses are not too big to fail. However, they are
too important to fail, because they have played a pivotal
role in the transmission of ideas and culture.
University presses are dened as the publishing houses associated with higher
education institutions GiraldoGonzález GimnezToledo CrdobaRestrepo
this means that they are almost always a suborganization of universities
Anderson Their main objective is to promote publishing scholarly books
and scientic journals and thereby contribute to achieve one of the substantive
missions of universities generate new knowledge Britton VázquezMiraz
PosadaLlorente By doing that they support the advancement of knowl-
edge and science economic development intercultural dialogue Greco Aiss
and social welfare beyond their local area of inuence while seeking
greater impacts that enable problem-solving nationally and internationally.
Publishing scientic articles in journals has been the main research unit
in the information sciences especially in the library and information studies
It has led to the comprehension of publishing patterns in dierent study elds
Chi the internationalization of collaboration Kwiek to measure
impact LanchoBarrantes GuerreroBote De MoyaAnegn the capabil-
ities in the management of knowledge Ceballos Fangmeyer Galeano Juarez
CantuOrtiz and to rank researchers outputs at individual Hirsch
university Aguillo BarIlan Levene Ortega internal academic units
Zornic et al and country levels Jacs
In the same framework but counting out other bookcentered approaches
like those from the literature documentation and library disciplines or research
areas such as writing editing and publishing studies scholarly books have
Adolfo A. Abadía
started gaining interest in the last two decades as a unit of analysis For example as
a way to approach the quality and prestige of scholarly publications GimnezTo-
ledo GimnezToledo CrdobaRestrepo GiraldoGonzález MaanaRo-
drguez to analyze collaboration patterns Ossenblok Engels and
to review their value for modern research evaluation systems Engels Istenič
Starčič Kulczycki Plnen Sivertsen Zuccala RobinsonGarca
From the publishers perspective books also allow addressing assessment
initiatives nationally and internationally GimnezToledo MaanaRodrguez
TejadaArtigas understanding online marketing strategies to reach new
audiences through social media MasBleda Makita MrvaMontoya Thelwall
and targeting the academic impact of books by tracking their citations
performance on Google Scholar Mingers Kaymaz or Book Citation Index
TorresSalinas RobinsonGarca Campanario LpezCzar TorresSali-
nas RobinsonGarca JimnezContreras LpezCzar
In elds such as Social Sciences and Humanities SSH books remain an
essential publication type Verleysen Ossenblok and an integral part of
scientic communications They play a key role to understand the conguration
of collaborations and internationalization of scholarly research Ossenblok
Engels Books are dierent from journals especially in SSH because they
cover research topics such as stateoftheart analysis and broader contexts
allow depth explanations detailed perspectives and develop theories that do not
t well in a scholarly communications like scientic articles GimnezToledo
Moreover books play a crucial role in the preservation and transference
of knowledge to society.
To study the performance of research output citations only reveal a limited
portion of information of interest to the entire book publishing industry Zuc-
cala RobinsonGarca It would be possible to have a wider view through
bibliometric analysis which oers a broad set of tools that might help to under-
stand the book publishing ecosystem better at least in the scholarly book sector
This exploratory pilot case study embraces Social Networks Analysis SNA
as the quantitative technique used to understand how collaborations ow within
a given scholarly network It aims at identifying important or inuential individ-
uals describe network structure and how individual positions and interactions
t within a network Golbeck In this way it contributes to the eld of edi-
torial studies in Colombia which is still a young research area GiraldoGonzález
et al barely addressed among librarians and documentalists as well as
among publishers and book researchers in Colombia.
This study focuses on the publishing of monographs and edited books as
long as they represent essential communications media in SSH GimnezToledo
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