A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF THE CO-AUTHORSHIP NETWORK OF THE PACIFIC ASIA CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS FROM 1993 TO 2008

Abstract

Using bibliographic data extracted from an Endnote database, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse a network of co-authors with the aim of developing an understanding of the research community that produces the research knowledge published by the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS). The PACIS community was found to be a healthy small-world community that kept evolving in order to provide an environment that supports collaboration and sharing of ideas between researchers. It was also found that, unlike a similar analysis of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), the Pacific Asian IS scene was not dominated by a couple of key researchers as quite a significant number of star performers were identified. In fact, with a number of popular researchers, the Pacific Asian IS community is very similar to the Australasian IS community for which a similar analysis was performed at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) level.