Transcript - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Networks of scientific collaboration in Competitive Intelligence field
Eva Ortoll and Montserrat Garcia Alsina
KIMO Research group of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Background
Requirements to be an academic discipline (Vanderstraeten,
2010; Kun, 2006):
Results
Collaboration networks: co-authorship
(micro-level analysis)
 Networks of experts  scientific community
 Common paradigms  validity and reliability of empirical studies
 Specific scientific publications  interaction and knowledge flows
 Development of new research topics
How mature is the academic field of Competitive Intelligence?
Objectives
 What are the patterns of scientific collaboration in CI field?
 In which topics does scientific community work and how do they evolve?
 Which channels does scientific community use to communicate?
Methods
Data gathering
Collaboration networks: institutional collaboration
(meso-level analysis)

Authors and groups with low productivity and weak links among them

Authors with very few relations among them

Isolated teams with low interaction among them

Slight increase of interdisciplinary collaboration

Weak bridges among institutions

Slight increase of inter-institutional collaboration
Topics of research
 Papers from ISI web of Science (1995 – 2012)
 Keywords
1995-2000
2001-2006
2007-2012
competitive intelligence
marketing intelligence
economic intelligence
intelligence analysis
territorial intelligence
environmental scanning
 679 papers were gathered

Progressive connexion among topics

Difficulties
Data analysis
 Great variety of descriptors
 Social networks analysis
 Increasing synonyms to identify the same area of
research
 Bibliometric analysis
 Evolution trough tree periods:
1995-2000
 First period:
 technological issues and management
 Second period
 technological issues maintain their presence,
 increase in subtopics about: Open Sources, Economic Intelligence,
visualization, data and text mining
2001-2006
2007-2012
 Third period:
 Groups of data: co-authorship  collaboration
co-words networks  topics
journal and congress statistics  channels to communicate
 Open Sources and Visualization issues continues,
 Information Analysis is increasing
Channels to communicate: publications and journals
Journals
Congress
Results




Few academic journals
Few congresses specific to CI (only 2)
Lack of descriptors homogenization
The interdisciplinary nature of the field
makes the consolidation of channels for
knowledge interaction difficult
 Increasing predominance of:



Collaboration networks: co-authorship
(micro-level analysis)
1995-2000
Conclusions
2007-2012
 Weak interconnected scientific community.
2001-2006
 Dispersion of topics.
 Lack of common language.
 Weak channels of communication.
Computer science,
Business & Economics
Information % library science (except in
congress)