APPLYING KEYWORD AND SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSES TO DEVELOP MORE EFFECTIVE RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS

Author

Anna S. Banks, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleFollow

Date of Award

5-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Evaluation, Statistics, and Methodology

Major Professor

Louis Rocconi

Committee Members

Deborah Crawford, Jennifer Morrow, Joshua Rosenberg

Abstract

The highly competitive research funding system drives American research universities to the cutting edge of technological innovation and scientific development. An abundance of funding prospects is available to the most talented researchers. Talent, however, is not the only prerequisite required of the researchers to obtain the funding. Modern research problems are complex and global and require collaboration of scientists from multiple disciplines.

To empower institutional researchers and to help them obtain funding, American universities create research development teams whose main purpose is to guide and support the formation of collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams capable of solving the complexities of modern science. A quantitative method similar to the algorithm used by the Google search engine was proposed to help research development professionals facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration.

A combination of keyword and social network analyses was applied to assess a researcher’s potential to succeed in a research team and to identify the most central, influential, and cognitively diverse members with an interest in a given problem. The keyword analyses reveal individuals that are more likely to have a research interest in the problem and the network analyses reveal the most important of these researchers.

Several research questions were established to drive the development of the method and set the criteria and the order of the steps needed to measure researchers’ potential. To validate the results of method, researchers who were identified as the top matches for two collaboration opportunities were surveyed about the extent to which the computed measurements reflected the reality as it was perceived by these researchers themselves.

High levels of agreement with the examined measurements reported by the survey respondents and cross-validation of the results by the visual examination of the social network data provided empirical support for the method. It appears that the method measures what it was designed to measure and does so in a consistent manner. It can be concluded that the method functions as a measurement instrument that mirrors the operational reality of the measurement concepts and can be applied to match a given research collaboration opportunity with a given institutional workforce.

Recommended Citation

Banks, Anna S., "APPLYING KEYWORD AND SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSES TO DEVELOP MORE EFFECTIVE RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2024.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/10065