Exploring invisible scientific communities: Studying networking relations within an educational research community. A Finnish case

Abstract

The present study focused on making invisiblecolleges of educational science in Finlandvisible through analysing networking relationsbetween scientific research communities. Thestudy aims at developing methods to analyse theintensity and focus of social collaborationbetween educational research groups in order tounderstand internal relations of scientificdiscipline and support scientific evaluationwith information about participation andinformal communication beyond quantity ofpublished products. Informal and formalnetworking connections of the professors ofeducation in Finland were examined by usingdifferent methods of social network analysis. The results of the study revealed that theinformal information flow between professors ofeducation concentrated within universitieswhereas more formal collaborative relations(e.g. citations) cross boundaries betweenuniversities. The educational research wasstructured as three distinct invisible colleges(learning researchers, research on teaching,and the sociology of education). Furthermore,the professors differed considerably in termsof informal collaborative relations andcitations. Only a few central actors dominatededucational research in receiving the majorityof the citations, whereas some professorsappeared to be completely isolated from othereducational research network. We conclude thatsocial network analysis opens up a newpromising perspective, which can be used inanalysing and assessing different branches ofscience.