Artikel,
Social Networks in Information Science: behavioral evidences of the researchers and evolutional trends of the coauthor network
Inf. Inf, (2007)Portuguese.
Zusammenfassung
The analysis of complex networks, in special of the social networks,
has being of interest to the scientific community worldwide. Such
interest is due to its ability to represent complex problems in an
objective manner, allowing for a theoretical and practical framework
to study the characteristics, properties and behavior of the elements
composing the problems. In the field of Information Science, techniques
of Social Network Analysis have being used to analyze the information
flow inside communities as well as the structure of scientific collaboration
networks. However, evolutional aspects that could be help to predict
the behavior of the authors and, consequently, of the future structure
have been neglected. It is possible to compare Social Network Analysis,
disregarding its evolutional aspect, with a photograph, which is
naturally static. Despite its importance, the photograph cannot be
so rich in details as a motion picture, whose temporal elements ease
the context analysis and the construction of predicting scenarios.
This paper evidences the behavior of researchers in the Information
Science�s field in Brazil, appealing to the evolutional analysis
of the coauthor network, forecasting impacts on the structure of
such networks in the next few years
