Document Type : Research

Authors

1 PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology and Development, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

2 Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

Knowledge and expertise offer economic benefits to the actors of scientific communication and information network. If professionals are unable to interact with the members of their network, they may never get cognizant of job opportunities related to their expertise (especially in humanities fields). Therefore, the main purposes of this study are as follows: first, prioritize the general types of scientific communication and information networks in terms of informing about job opportunities through scientific collaboration with social contacts at various levels of knowledge diffusion. Second, determining the network to which the performance of the scientific collaboration network of sociology students correspond in terms of access to job information. The present paper draws on social network analysis approach in terms of theory, method, and technique. The study population includes all graduate students in the field of Sociology studying at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (60 students). Data type is relational, which was collected using name-generator questionnaire, and data analysis was conducted by R software. Findings from network description showed that members prefer to forge scientific collaboration with people who are either famous or associated with renowned colleagues, as well as those with whom they are collaborating. Findings from network-based modeling suggested that small-world network demonstrated the best performance in terms of finding job opportunities on the account of scientific collaboration with social contacts followed by regular network, random network and scale-free network. However, the performance of the scientific collaboration network of sociology students such as a scale-free network is bipolar. According to the results, scientific communication and information network is deemed efficient when it not only generates knowledge, but also a provides job information.
 
 
 

Keywords

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