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Conceptualization of science using collaboration and competences

Mario Karlovcec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Dunja Mladenic (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Marko Grobelnik (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Mitja Jermol (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 1 February 2016

1053

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for conceptualizing science based on collaboration and competences of researchers.

Design/methodology/approach

The research is conducted by exploratory analysis of collaboration and competences using case studies from humanistic, engineering, natural sciences and a general topic.

Findings

The findings show that by applying the proposed approach on bibliographic data that readily exist for many national sciences as well as for international scientific communities, one can obtain useful new insights into the research. The approach is demonstrated with the following exploratory findings: identification of important connections and individual researchers that connect the community of anthropologists; collaboration of technical scientists in the community of anthropologists caused by an interdisciplinary research project; connectivity, interdisciplinary and structure of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and a community based on a general topic; and identifying research interest shift described with concretization and topic-shift.

Practical implications

As demonstrated with the practical implementation (http://scienceatlas.ijs.si/), users can obtain information of the most relevant competences of a researcher and his most important collaborators. It is possible to obtaining researchers, community structure and competences of an arbitrary research topic.

Social implications

The map for collaboration and competences of a complete science can be a crucial tool for policy-making. Social scientists can use the results of the proposed approach to better understand and direct the development of science.

Originality/value

Originality and value of the paper is in combining text (competences) and network (research collaboration and co-authoring) approaches for exploring science. Additional values give the results of analysis that demonstrate the approach.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) for useful feedback, suggestions and assistance with obtaining the data. The authors also thank the Institute for Information Science, Maribor (IZUM) for providing Web services used for retrieving the data used in this study. Additionally, Marjana Plukavec and Gaber Cerle from Jožef Stefan Institute are appreciated for their contribution on the project. This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, the IST Programme of the EC under XLike (ICT-STREP-288342) and PlanetData (ICT-NoE-257641).

Citation

Karlovcec, M., Mladenic, D., Grobelnik, M. and Jermol, M. (2016), "Conceptualization of science using collaboration and competences", The Electronic Library, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 2-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-01-2014-0015

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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