Analyzing the Socio-Cognitive Structure of an Economic Research Community
(2009)Abstract
Research papers published by authors in various fields give rise to huge datasets. A social network of the authors can be built up using these datasets by treating the references between papers as the links between the authors publishing those papers. These networks also have a cognitive structure to them based on the themes that various authors discuss. In this thesis we describe the procedure of building up a bibliographical tool for presenting a dataset of research papers in a particular field. We show the results that this tool produces on the dataset downloaded from the Repec website. We also describe a few mathematical measures that analyze the relationship between the cognitive and social structure of the network created from this dataset. The results produced by this analysis are in coherence with the results produced by different researchers in the past.