80 A Study of Structure and Evolution of Marketing Research Collaboration Network

Research collaboration is a traditional academic social network for exchanging knowledge. Patterns of co-authorship networks reveal interesting properties of a certain discipline. In this paper, we studied the marketing research collaboration network. The dataset was obtained from the Marketing Connectivity Project which documents various information about authors and their collaborations in 40 marketing-related journals between 1973 and 2009. The collaboration network was analyzed using statistical measurements: degree distribution, average path length, and clustering coefficient. Moreover, we also studied the evolution of the collaboration network through time. Our research has implications for the prediction of growth of the academic society and the study of other social networks.