Mapping the scientific structure of organization and management of enterprises using complex networks

Abstract

Understanding the scientific and social structure of a discipline is a fundamental aspect for scientific evaluation processes, identifying trends and niches, and balancing the trade-off between exploitation and exploration in research. In the present contribution, the production of doctoral theses is used as a proxy to analyze the scientific structure of the knowledge area of business organization in Spain. To that end, a complex networks approach is selected, and two different networks are built: (i) the social network of co-participation in thesis examining committees and thesis supervision, and (ii) a bipartite network of theses and thesis descriptors. The former has a modular structure that is partially explained by thematic specialization in different subdisciplines. The latter serves to assess the interdisciplinary structure of the discipline, as it enables the characterization of affinity levels between fields, research poles and thematic clusters. Our results have implications for the scientific evaluation and formal definition of related fields.

Network analysis of co-participation in thesis examination committees in an academic field in Spain

“…Such networks were obtained using the information available in the TESEO database. This approach has been recently proposed as a bibliometric tool to detect scientific communities (Duarte-Martínez, López-Herrera & Cobo 2018;Arnaiz-Rodríguez, Ramírez-Sanz, Garrido-Labrador & Olivares-Gil 2021;Olivares-Gil et al 2022) or to identify the most relevant actors in a specific academic field (Castelló i Cogollos, Bueno Cañigral & Valderrama Zurián 2019). In addition, for some time now, the use of doctoral theses for the characterization of research in a scientific field is considered a particularly insightful approximation (Ardanuy, Urbano & Quintana 2009).…”

El Patrimonio Jacobeo y su gestión desde las Humanidades Digitales: presente y futuro del Camino de Santiago en Castilla y León

“…Por otro lado, también se estudian las tesis doctorales defendidas con éxito en el campo científico, ya que constituyen un producto científico con ciertas particularidades que complementan la visión proporcionada por los manuscritos indexados encontrados en Scopus (Díaz-de la Fuente et al, 2022b;Garrido-Labrador et al, 2023;Olivares-Gil et al, 2022;Repiso-Caballero et al, 2011). Concretamente, dado que el esfuerzo y compromiso requeridos para producir una tesis doctoral suelen ser mayores que los 134 Del inglés: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses 196 necesarios para otros empeños científicos, las tesis doctorales reflejan tendencias científicas más robustas y una base más sólida en ciertas líneas de investigación.…”