Network closure, brokerage, and structural influence of journals: a longitudinal study of journal citation network in In
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Network closure, brokerage, and structural influence of journals: a longitudinal study of journal citation network in Internet research (2000–2010) Tai Quan Peng • Zhen-Zhen Wang
Received: 6 November 2012 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2013
Abstract The study aims to assess journals’ structural influence in Internet research and uncover the impacts of network structures on journals’ structural influence drawing on theories of network closure and structural holes. The data of the study are the citation exchanges among 1,210 journals in Communication and other seven social scientific fields (i.e., Business, Economics/Finance, Education, Information Science, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology) in Internet research. The top two most influential journals in Internet research are American Economic Review and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Journals in ‘‘Communication’’ field emerge to be an important source of influence in Internet research, whose mean structural influence ranks third among the eight fields, below ‘‘Business’’ and ‘‘Economics/Finance’’, but above other five fields. Journals’ structural influences are found to grow over time and the growth rates vary across journals. Network brokerage is found to exert a significant impact on journals’ structural influence, while the impact of network closure on journals’ structural influences is not significant. The impact of network brokerage on journals’ structural influence will increase over time. Keywords Internet research Network closure Brokerage Citation network Scholarly influence
Journals have become the primary medium to create and diffuse scholarly knowledge in Internet research, indicated by the dramatically increasing number of Internet studies published in scholarly journals in the past decade (Peng et al. 2013). With the proliferation of journals in which Internet studies are published, it is of particular significance to study
T. Q. Peng (&) Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] Z.-Z. Wang Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
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Scientometrics
the relative influence of journals in an emerging area like Internet research. First, such an analysis can demonstrate roles of different journals in the exchange of ideas in Internet research, which can provide valuable insights into the development and current status of knowledge structure of the field (Leydesdorff 2003). Secondly, it can be used as evidence of scholarship and making tenure/promotion decisions (Johnson and Podsakoff 1994). It has been empirically confirmed that journals differ in their influence in various disciplines (e.g., Cote et al. 1991; van Campenhout et al. 2008) and over time (e.g., Johnson and Podsakoff 1994; Baumgartner and Pieters 2003). These differences are usually attributed to journals’ intrinsic characteristics (e.g., journals’ age, number of articles published, aggregate quality of ar
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