Seaport Research: An Analysis of Research Collaboration using Social Network Analysis

The collaboration of researchers has become the norm due to the increasingly interdisciplinary and complex characteristics of modern science. Many studies in informatics and various disciplines including logistics and supply chain management have explored how researchers conduct collaborative works and have shown a strong relationship between collaboration and research productivity. In seaport research, however, research collaboration has not been studied even though this may provide useful information about collaboration patterns, networks, behavior, and especially the effect on growth of port research. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to explore how maritime researchers and institutions have collaborated in port research and examine whether the collaboration has increased publishing productivity. This study uses co-authorship as an indicator of research collaboration and the number of papers as an indicator of research productivity. Using a database of academic papers published in English-language international journals for the last three decades (1980-2009), descriptive statistics show a growth in levels of co-authorship by decade and international geography of research collaboration. Social network analysis is then used to draw a map of collaboration and reveals the structure and decadal change of these collaborative networks. The analysis also shows who and which institutions have been at the center of port research and how co-authorship and collaboration have affected productivity of researchers and institutions over the period.