Utilising social network analysis to study the characteristics and functions of the co-occurrence network of online tags

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the characteristics of the co-occurrence network of online tags and propose new approaches of applying social network analysis by utilising social tagging in order to organise data. Design/methodology/approach – The authors collected online resources labelled “tag” from 7 November 2004 to 31 October 2011 from the CiteULike website, comprising 684 papers and their URLs, titles and data on tagging (users, times, and tags). They examined the co-occurrence network of online tags by using the analyses of social networks, including the analysis of coherence, the analysis of centricity and core to periphery categorical analysis. Findings – Some features of the co-occurrence of online tags are as follows: the internet is subject to the “small world” phenomenon, as well as being “scale-free”. The structure of the internet reflects stable areas of core knowledge. In addition to five possible applications of social network analysis, social tagging has the greatest significance in...

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