Co-authorship among the Fellows of the International Communication Association

What is it about?

This study employs social network analysis to describe the structure of collaboration among Fellows of the International Communication Association (ICA), an elite group of social scientists, using co-authorship data gathered from Google Scholar. Network analysis revealed that fellows were loosely connected, consistent with past research on elite scholars. Although the association is “international,” over 80% of its members were educated and over 75% were most recently employed in the United States. However, North America did not significantly predict network centrality. No differences in network centrality were observed based on the status of being a former ICA President. Males tended to be slightly more central than females. Unlike for the ICA membership as a whole, Fellows were not differentiated into separate research communities. Furthermore, Fellows have conducted little international collaboration. These results are discussed in terms of the prior literature and its shortcomings.

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