Taiwan Academic Network Discussion via Social Networks Analysis Perspective

Academic network (AN) is quite different network and hard to acquire relative information for inexperience researchers. To realize AN is an important but difficult work because of the constituents of AN are complicated and dynamic variation. In this research, two Taiwan academic networks are established from the perspectives of academic conference topic and participant committee. Each academic conference is regarded as an AN node to establish the conference academic network. In addition, there are two connection types between AN nodes, including: the relationship among CFP topics (academic conference topic perspective) and the relationship between committee member (participant committee perspective). Finally, 15 IT/IM relative target conferences in Taiwan 2009 are analyzed via social network analysis methodology. According to experiment result, the values of degree and betweeness reveal some interesting findings, such as TANET, OOTA and IMP are top three important bridge conferences in Taiwan. Additionally, as the cluster analyzed result shown, academic network somehow represents domain expertise because of the committee are grouped according to their research domains. These finding is consistence with the reality academic network in Taiwan and helpful information for Taiwan academic network understanding.