THE SOCİOLOGY OF CAREER FİELD: INVESTİGATİNG SCİENTİFİC RESEARCH COLLABORATİON TROUGH CO-AUTHORSHİP ANALYSES

Abstract

The process of forming the social structure of a specific scientific field, scientific collaboration, and research groups have a critical role in creating and generalizing the scientific knowledge in that field, hence improving that particular scientific field. This research has investigated the social and conceptual structure of the career field by using bibliometric methods referred to as “objective methods.” The framework of the study included examining all the articles in the journals indexed on the Web of Science between 1975-2018 regarding the career field in the sub-categories of applied psychology, administration, and business management through the conduct of VOSviewer, Pajek, and BibExcel analysis software. First of all, the “social network” between career researchers has been analyzed, and research cooperation clusters have been revealed within the context of the research. Secondly, the centralities of the researchers in the social network have been calculated. As a result of the analysis, 29 clusters of researchers’ scientific collaborations in the career field were identified. In addition, the researchers who contributed the most to the production of knowledge in the field, the main journals in which career articles were published, and the central researchers in the research cooperation networks in the field were identified. The findings were discussed and compared with the literature.