Coauthorship Dynamics and Knowledge Capital: The Patterns of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in Information Systems Research

Abstract

Psychology. His current research interests include team processes and effectiveness in organizational settings, innovation implementation at the individual and team levels of analysis, individual and contextual determinants of individual and team creativity, and effects of social networks on knowledge and creativity in organizations.KIMIN KIM is a Ph.D. candidate in the faculty of management at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation, which examines the social capital aspects of interorganizational networks. His research interests include the sociological investigation of intra-and interorganizational networks, network dynamics, and the strategic implications of corporate collaboration networks.ABSTRACT: From the social network perspective, this study explores the ontological structure of knowledge sharing activities engaged in by researchers in the field of information systems (IS) over the past three decades. We construct a knowledge network based on coauthorship patterns extracted from four major journals in the IS field in order to analyze the distinctive characteristics of each subfield and to assess the amount of internal and external knowledge exchange that has taken place among IS researchers. This study also tests the role of different types of social capital that influence the academic impact of researchers. Our results indicate that the proportion of coauthored IS articles in the four journals has doubled over the past 25 years, from merely 40 percent in 1978 to over 80 percent in 2002. However, a significant variation exists in terms of the shape, density, and centralization of knowledge exchange networks across the four subfields of IS-namely, behavioral science, organizational science, computer science, and economic science. For example, the behavioral science Downloaded by [Universität Osnabrueck] at 00:32 27 May 2015 266 OH, CHOI, AND KIM

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