A novel approach based on journal coupling to determine authors who are most likely to be part of the same invisible college

ABSTRACT Purpose In this paper, we use author clustering based on journal coupling (i.e., shared academic journals) to determine researchers who have the same scientific interests and similar conceptual frameworks. The basic assumption is that authors who publish in the same academic journals are more likely to share similar conceptual frameworks and interests than those who never publish in the same venues. Therefore, they are more likely to be part of the same invisible college (i.e., authors in this subgroup contribute materially to research on the same topic and often publish their work in similar publication venues). Design/methodology/approach Test in a controlled exercise the grouping of authors based on journal coupling to determine invisible colleges in a research field using a case study of 302 authors who had published in the Information Science and Library Science (IS&LS) category of the Web of Science Core Collection. For each author, we retrieved all the scientific journals in which this author had published his/her articles. We then used the cosine measure to calculate the similarity between authors (both first and second order). Findings In this paper, using journal coupling of IS&LS authors, we found four main invisible colleges: “Information Systems”, “Business and Information Management”, “Quantitative Information Science” and “Library Science.” The main journals that determine the existence of these invisible colleges were Inform Syst Res, Inform Syst J, J Bus Res, J Knowl Manage, J Informetr, Pro Int Conf Sci Inf, Int J Geogr Inf Sci, J Am Med Inform Assn, and Learn Publ. However, the main journals that demonstrate that IS&LS determine a field were J Am Soc Inf Sci Tec/J Assoc Inf Sci Tech, Scientometrics, Inform Process Manag, and J Inf Sci. Research limitations The results shown in this article are from a controlled exercise. The analysis performed using journal coupling excludes books, book chapters, and conference papers. In this article, only academic journals were used for the representation of research results. Practical implications Our results may be of interest to IS&LS scholars. This is because these results provide a new lens for grouping authors, making use of the authors’ journal publication profile and journal coupling. Furthermore, extending our approach to the study of the structure of other disciplines would possibly be of interest to historians of science as well as scientometricians. Originality/value This is a novel approach based on journal coupling to determine authors who are most likely to be part of the same invisible college.