Co-authorship Network Structure Analysis of Iranian Researchers’ scientific outputs from 1991 to 2013 based on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)

In scientific fields, collaboration is an important indicator of scientific activity which has increased rapidly by the revolution in information and telecommunication technology. Co-authorship which is the most outstanding aspect of scientific collaboration is so common in scientific and academic societies; and in previous decades it has increased in terms its importance and usage. This paper aims to investigate the Iranian researchers’ output from 1991 through 2013. Accordingly the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) to visualize and analyse the scientific performance of Iranian researchers’ co-authorship network based on their scientific publications. Data were gathered from Web of Science (SSCI). on March 13th, 2013. Totally 6009 documents of all types were retrieved. Then by using Coauthor.exe, UCINET and NETDRAW software the co-authorship map was drawn and the analysis was carried out based on social network analysis measures such as centrality (closeness and betweenness etc.).The results showed the most prolific author and the most prolific university/institutions and the journal preference. According to the subject field, most of these documents belonged to psychology subject area. Most of Iranian researchers’ scientific collaboration was with United States of America.Co-authorship Network Structure of Iranian Researchers’ publications from 1991 through 2013 in SSCI shows that Mohammadi with centrality degree 55, betweenness degree 160, closeness centrality 29.4 (distance 92) ranked topin each of these measures. In this map there is a cut points by Ahmadi which can signify the important role of this researcher in this co-authorship network.