IT/IM academic network in Taiwan via social networks analyze of conference committees

For inexperience researcher, academic network (AN) is a specific network and hard to acquire relative information. To realize AN is an important but difficult work because of the constituents of AN are complicated and dynamic variation. In this research, two academic networks are established individually from academic conference and committee member perspectives. Particularly, for conference academic network, every academic conference is regarded as a AN node and two connection types among nodes are further analyzed, including: the relationship of CFP topic list and the relationship of committee member. Finally, 20 IT/IM relative target conferences in Taiwan 2009 are analyzed via social network analysis methodology. As the experiment result shown, from degree and between values by SNA, some interesting findings are revealed, such as TANEY, OOTA and IMP are important bridge conferences. Additionally, as the cluster analyzed result shown, academic network somehow represents domain expertise because of the committee are grouped according to their research domain. These finding is consist with the research assumptions and can be further helpful information for academic network understanding to capture research trend and new research issue.