Spanish research groups on Economy and Management: a network analysis approach

The aim of this article is to study the evolution of the Spanish research groups on Economy and Management. Due to subject headings lists are considered to be insufficient and inflexible to describe relationship between sciences, the authors develop a method to link journals from the SSCI depending on their subjects on this thematic area. The application of social network analysis to retrieval information in a multidisciplinary database has been demonstrate as very helpful to represent interdisciplinarity in a knowledge area, in particular the Social Science Citation Index. Secondly, a network is created based on co-authorship from the Spanish articles provided on this database and represented for three periods: 1992-1996, 1997-2001 and 2002-2006. The use bibliometric indicators as main attributes of nodes in the network analysis have been helpful to identify equivalent positions, actors who show the same role within each graph.