Jariah Mohd. Jan

Mapping research collaborations in the business and management field in Malaysia, 1980---2010

This paper examines research collaborations in the field of business and management in Malaysia, a fast-developing economy in Southeast Asia. The country aims to become a developed nation by the year 2020, guided by its well-charted Wawasan 2020 or Vision 2020 program. Research and development are important agenda items within this program. Rarely, however, have studies investigated the research collaborations of researchers based in Malaysia from the network perspective. After a manual author disambiguation process, we examined the network of 285 business and management researchers at the individual, institutional, and international levels. Author collaborations per paper almost doubled between 2001 and 2010 compared to the period 1980–1990. The popularity of researchers and the strength and diversity of their ties with other researchers had significant effects on their research performance. Furthermore, geographical proximity still mattered in intra-national collaborations. Malaysian institutions more often collaborated intra-institutionally or with foreign partners than with other institutions within Malaysia. The country’s five research universities are among the top-most productive of all institutions in Malaysia. Malaysia’s top international partners are all developed countries, including the US, Australia, Japan, the UK, and Canada. Surprisingly, Malaysia has had relatively little collaboration with ASEAN nations, of which it is a prominent member and which has an important agenda of educational cooperation within its member states. Internationally co-authored articles have been cited almost three times more than locally co-authored articles. Based on these results, we suggest an effective co-authorship strategy.

Research collaboration networks of two OIC nations: comparative study between Turkey and Malaysia in the field of `Energy Fuels', 2009---2011

With the world in the midst of an energy crisis, recent research has placed considerable emphasis on harnessing renewable and sustainable energy while efficiently using fossil fuels. Researchers create and sustain academic societies as a result of social interactions. This study takes a social network perspective to understand researchers’ associations using two Organisation of Islamic Co-operation nations, Turkey and Malaysia, in the fast-developing field of ‘Energy Fuels’. The study found both similarities and differences in the scholarly networks of these two countries. The mean distance between the authors in the Turkey and Malaysia networks was 8.4 and 6.5, respectively, confirming the small world nature of these networks. The popularity, position, and prestige of the authors in the network, as determined through centrality measures, had a statistically significant effect on research performance. These measures, however, were far more correlated with the research performance of the authors in the Malaysia network than in the Turkey network. PageRank centrality was found to be the most efficient topological measure when it came to correlation with research performance. We used authors’ ‘degree’ to reach to the ‘core’ (‘Deg-Core’) of the network (in contrast to the K-Core method), which was found to capture more productive authors. A method to detect academic communities of productive authors by extracting motifs (large cliques) from the network is suggested. Finally, we visualize the cognitive structure of both countries using a 2-mode network representing research focus areas (RFAs) and prominent authors working in these RFAs.

Relationship between authors’ structural position in the collaboration network and research productivity: Case of Indian earth scientists

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compute and analyze the topological properties of co-authorship network formed between earth scientists in India. As a case study, the authors evaluate bibliographic data of authors who have contributed research articles in the Journal of the Geological Society of India, a premier earth science journal in India. Design/methodology/approach – Research articles totaling 3,903 records from 1970 to 2011 were harvested from the ISI Web of Science SCI database and analyzed using Social Network Analysis. Findings – The author productivity in terms of number of papers published followed Lotkas law with β=2.1027. A dense giant component was detected that spanned 73 percent of the network with a density of 0.0017 and clustering coefficient of 0.631, suggesting high level of knowledge diffusion and a rapid flow of information and creativity in this network. Local metrics were calculated using degree, betweenness and closeness centralities. A strong correlation was seen betw...

The assortativity of scholars at a research-intensive university in Malaysia

– The purpose of this study was to provide quantitative indicators of intra-university assortative mixing patterns of scholars based on five parameters: degree of connections, faculty, professional position, gender and race. , – We conducted a case study of business and management scholars of University of Malaya, a research-intensive University in Malaysia, using co-authorship in papers indexed in the Digital Library Indexing System, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database of Web of Science, from 2006 to 2010. Background information of scholars was extracted from bibliometric records, online curriculum vitaes and other online sources. Assortativity coefficients were calculated for all parameters. , – The study found a degree assortativity coefficient of 0.195, which corresponds with other studies in the literature. Assortativity due to university faculty was strongly assortative at 0.649, whereas gender (0.28) and race (0.16) were weakly assortative. However, in contrast to the common belief that “similarity breeds connection”, the scholars were highly disassortative by professional position (−0.75). , – This study holds significance to policymakers in understanding the socio-academic factors that bring scholars together. It also adds to the body of knowledge in social network studies that are examining the various factors responsible in bringing the actors together. , – This is one of the first studies that empirically investigated mixing patterns of researchers at a prominent research-intensive university in Malaysia.