A Influência da Imersão Institucional e Regional na Cooperação entre Pesquisadores no Brasil

The analysis of a scientific field considering it as a social network has broadened the understanding of the relationships among researchers. In addition to the information obtained directly from the relationships among peers, structural issues emerge, providing explanations about how broad social connections condition coauthorship relationships. In an attempt to contribute to this research stream, the objective of this paper is to analyze how the relationships among researchers in the Information Management field in Brazil are conditioned by their working for the same universities or living in the same geographical area. In order to accomplish that, a social networks analysis method was used, more specifically the generalized blockmodels technique, in order to test homophily and core-periphery models. It was found that all homophily models were significant and that the conditioning due to belonging to the same university was stronger than that caused by living in the same area. Differently to what was expected, the core-periphery models proved little significant. Based on the results that were significant, one realizes that there are selection mechanisms that are used by researchers that live in some geographic areas, related to the access to resources and information or the existence of some more traditional postgraduate programs whose professors attract the collaboration of others. The results of the study have important practical and theoretical implications and provide several opportunities for further studies.