The emergence of team science: Understanding the state of adoption research through social network analysis

Abstract

The notion of team science has recently gained popularity in European and American health sciences considering increasing evidence that scientific collaboration produces higher-impact research and that complex scientific problems are better investigated by interdisciplinary teams. While publication metrics indicate adoption research is expanding, the comprehensive structure of adoption studies as a scientific field has not been formally evaluated for collaborative and cross-disciplinary activity. This article aims to elucidate the structure, composition, and dynamics of scientific relationships within adoption research that may inform research and practice strategies, competencies, and cohesion within the field. Using social network analysis, we extracted bibliographic data on 2767 peer-reviewed adoption-related articles from 1930s to 2014 and evaluated the resulting co-authorship and co-citation networks. We found that adoption research has grown substantially over the last 25 years, and is conducted in varied disciplines, with increasing collaboration across geography and disciplinary areas. The co-authorship and co-citation networks are approaching numeric thresholds and structural configurations distinctive of well-established and more institutionalized fields of study. These findings reveal the maturation of adoption studies as a team science and argue for the development of institutional mechanisms that support such evolution. Implications for professional and research planning are discussed.

Keywords: Adoption; adoption research; co-authorship; co-citation; interdisciplinary teams; organization; research planning; social network analysis; team science.

Figure 1.

Number of co-authors and co-authored papers rise over time.

Figure 2.

Co-authorship network by components characteristics and isolates. * Number of nodes in largest component per every ten isolates

Figure 3.

Co-authorship networks over time. For each network, only the 5% largest connected components are shown.

Figure 4.

Co-authorship network 2010–2014. Only the 5% largest connected components are shown. Demarcated areas indicate approximate geographic and disciplinary affiliation identified in Table 2.

Figure 5.

Number of papers and recognized co-citations (references).

Figure 6.

Co-citation networks by component characteristics and isolates.

Figure 7.

Main component of adoption research co-citation networks over time.

Figure 8.

The single complex giant component of co-citation network 2010–2014.