A co-authorship analysis of product and industrial design education literature, 2000-2015

Abstract

Today, collaboration is the norm rather than exception in scholarly publications. Through coauthorship scholars can increase the volume and quality of their scientific output. Utilising these networks, they establish knowledge communities, which shape how academic fields evolve. As such recognising the structure of these collaborations is important for understanding fields and their trajectories. This paper undertakes an exploratory quantitative analysis of co-authorship networks in industrial and product design literature extracted from Web of Science between 2000 and 2015. Results indicate that the number of co-authored papers is rising yet large research networks do not exist in this area.