Coauthor Network Analysis of Journal of Agricultural Education Articles from 2008-2017

Abstract

The social capital of collaboration is a critical part of the research process. While AAAE supports collaboration and inclusivity, analysis has not occurred for what collaborations are occurring. This study addressed collaboration between researchers via a social network analysis of coauthorship in the Journal of Agricultural Education from 2008 to 2017. There were 587 articles published in that time frame with 593 unique authors. The number of articles published annually and number of authors per article increased during the 10-year period. The majority of authors only published one article in the time frame analyzed. After excluding authors who never collaborated on an article, a social network of 582 coauthors was analyzed. There was a general tendency for the most prolific authors to also be the most connected, though there were some outliers. Of note, the majority of the most connected authors received their terminal degrees from one of three institutions. The majority of the most prolific coauthor pairs were advisor-advisee pairings, and the remainder were individuals who had worked at the same institution during much of the study’s time frame. A prolific coauthor pairing was not necessarily indicative of a connection that was important for bridging authors across the network.

An Application of Social Network Analysis to Focus Group Discussions: Unobserved Interaction Between Participants and Discussion Topics

“…According to Luke (2015), network science has been widely used to study and understand interactions across fields of biological, physical, social, and informational systems by using functions of visualization, network features, participant details, or statistical models. This knowledge can provide a baseline understanding of what interactions are occurring (Settle et al, 2020). The development of several specific software tools and analysis packages allows researchers to solve dynamic and structural network problems in their research (Knoke & Yang, 2008).…”

Queering Agricultural Education Research: Challenges and Strategies for Advancing Inclusion

“…The particular reasons behind publication status of these papers are beyond the scope of this philosophical paper and cannot be answered through this analysis. Looking at the landscape of the field and the positioning of the texts, however, raises important questions about what kind of work is, and is not, published in agricultural education and then who it is, or is not cited by (Linder et al, 2020;Settle et al, 2020). Sedgwick's (1990) framework points to the ways that writing openly as a queer author -for example, Soder's (2009) identification of a partner with a traditionally masculine name in the acknowledgements section -can factor into what is included and excluded from the traditional disciplinary canon.…”

A Quantitative Content Analysis of Survey Research Methods Over a 40-Year Time Period in the Journal of Agricultural Education

“…1). The JAE is considered the premier journal for agricultural education researchers and serves as the outlet most frequently used for publication of studies related to agricultural education broadly defined (Harder et al, 2014;Radhakrishna, 1995;Settle et al, 2020;Swafford & Anderson, 2007). The journal was established in 1961 as the Journal of the American Association of Teacher Educators in Agriculture and underwent a name change to the Journal of Agricultural Education in 1989 (Radhakrishna et al, 1994).…”

“…In the last 20 years there has continued to be more articles published in the JAE on agricultural education research. Subjects have included handling nonresponse in research (Lindner et al, 2001;Johnson & Shoulders, 2017), the use of conceptual and theoretical frameworks (Dyer et al, 2003;Kitchel & Ball, 2014), philosophies framing agricultural education research (Miller, 2006), analysis of literature cited in the JAE (Swafford & Anderson, 2007), research productivity in the JAE (Harder et al, 2008), reporting effect size (Kotrlick et al, 2011), reporting and interpreting reliability (Warmbrod, 2014), improving common practices in agricultural education research (Johnson & Shoulders, 2019), coauthor network analysis (Settle et al, 2020), and improving journal impact factors (Lindner et al, 2020).…”