An Analysis of the Structure and Evolution of the Distance Education Research Area Community in Terms of Coauthorships

This article aims at characterizing the research community of Distance Education (DE) with respect to coauthorship, a special kind of collaboration among researchers, according to publications of 11 relevant DE journals. This article identified who the central researchers are, the topological properties of the coauthorship networks analyzed, the coauthorship patterns of each journal and the evolution of the DE community in the last 30 years. In order to achieve these goals, Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used, deriving centrality metrics, which depict the importance of researchers in the networks. This study found out that researchers who publish more papers are not necessarily the ones considered more central according to SNA. Besides, promising researchers, those linked to central researchers and are considered more likely to coauthor papers in the near future. Different coauthorship patterns among journals are described. Finally, a steep increase in the number of publications and coauthorships in the last decades was observed.