---

Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 1(1) (2013) 1--13 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2013.01.001

Gengyuan Liu$^{1}$, Zhifeng Yang$^{1}$, Bin Chen$^{1}$, Sergio Ulgiati$^{2}$

$^{1}$ State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

$^{2}$ Department of Environmental Sciences, Parthenope University of Naples, Centro Direzionale – Isola C4, 80143 Naples, Italy

Download Full Text PDF

 

Abstract

Using Social network analysis techniques, the authors visualize the co-authorship network and provide descriptive statistics regarding the degree to which researchers are embedded in it. The aim of this paper is to point out three issues including: (1) the use and quantification of international bibliographic databases; (2) Social Network Analysis and interpreting merits; and (3) visualization and the analysis of coauthorship networks for co-authorship data. The results showed that there was a strong linear relationship between the number of papers published and an author’s h-index. And the co-author network displayed the following features: with medium connected groups of authors; the network density is low; many sparse ties since there are still observed isolated authors or simple clusters in the network; and a medium propensity to collaborate with co-authors. Such an understanding is a necessary pre-requisite to establish an information flow and collaboration pattern among authors involved in the progress of the emergy accounting field.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51121003), National Key Technology R&D Program (No. 2012BAK30B03), Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 50939001, 41271543) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41101564).

References

1. [1]	Ulgiati, S. and Brown, M.T. (2002), Quantifying the environmental support for dilution and abatement of process emissions: The case of electricity production, Journal of Cleaner Production, 10, 335-348.

2. [2]	Liu, G.Y., Yang, Z.F., Chen, B. and Ulgiait, S. (2011), Monitoring trends of urban development and environmental impact of Beijing, 1999-2006, Science of The Total Environment, 409(18), 3295-3308.

3. [3]	Sachs, J. (2005), Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, UN Millennium Project, London, UK: Earthscan.

4. [4]

   Harris, P.J., Harris, E., Thompson, S., Harris-Roxas, B. and Kemp, L. (2009), Human health and wellbeing in environmental impact assessment in New South Wales, Australia: auditing health impacts within environmental assessments of major projects, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 29(5), 310-318.

5. [5]	Odum, H.T. (1971), Environment, Power, and Society, New York: Wiley Interscience.

6. [6]	Odum, H.T., Diamond, C. and Brown, M.T. (1987), Emergy analysis and public policy in Texas, policy research project report, Ecological Economics, 12, 54-65.

7. [7]	Odum, H.T. (1996), Environmental accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, New York: John Wiley and Sons.

8. [8]	Brown, M.T. and Ulgiati, S. (2004), Emergy analysis and environmental accounting, Encyclopedia of Energy, 2, 329-354.

9. [9]	Odum, H.T. (1988), Self-organization, transformity, and information, Science, 242, 1132-1139.

10. [10]

    Campbell, D.E. (2005), Financial accounting methods to further develop and communicate environmental accounting using emergy, In: Brown, M.T., Bardi, E., Campbell, D., Comar, V., Huang, S.L., Rydberg, T., Tilley, D., Ulgiati, S. (Eds.), Emergy Synthesis. 3 - Theory and Applications of the Emergy Methodology, Center for Environmental Policy, University of Florida, USA, pp. 185-198.

11. [11]	Dong, X.B., Ulgiati, S., Yan, M.C. and Gao, W.S. (2008), Progress, influence and perspectives of emergy theories in China, in support of environmentally sound economic development and equitable trade, Energy Policy, 36, 1019-1028.

12. [12]	Aram, J.D. (2004), Concepts of interdisciplinarity: Configurations of knowledge and action, Human Relations, 57(4), 379- 412.

13. [13]	Glanzel, W. and Schubert, A. (2005), Analyzing scientific networks through co-authorship, In: Moed, H., Glanzel, W., Schmoch , U. (eds.) Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, pp. 257-276. Springer, Netherlands.

14. [14]	De Stefano, D., Giordano, G. and Vitale, M.P. (2011), Issues in the analysis of co-authorship networks, Quality & Quantity, 45, 1091-1107.

15. [15]	Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994), The New Production of Knowledge, London: Sage.

16. [16]	Acedo, F.J., Barroso, C., Casanueva, C. and Galán, J.L. (2006), Co-authorship in management and organizational studies: An empirical and network analysis, Journal of Management Studies, 43, 957-983.

17. [17]	Faust, K. (2006), Comparing social networks: Size, density, and local structure, Metodološki zvezki, 3(2), 185-216.

18. [18]	Putzke, J., Fischbach, K., Schoder, D. and Gloor, P. (2010), The evolution of interaction networks in massively multiplayer online games, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 11(2), 69-94.

19. [19]	Persson, O. and Beckmann, M. (1995). Locating the network of interacting authors in scientific specialties, Scientometrics, 33(3), 351-366.

20. [20]	Newman, M.E.J. and Park, J. (2003), Why social networks are different from other types of networks, Physical Review E, 68(3), 1-8.

21. [21]	Cheong, F. and Corbitt, B.J. (2009), A social network analysis of the co-authorship network of the pacific Asia conference on information system from 1993 to 2008, In: Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2009), Verona, Italy, 8-10 June 2009.

22. [22]	Said, Y., Wegman, E., and Sharabati, W. (2010), Author-coauthor social networks and emerging scientific subfield, In: Palumbo, F., Lauro, N.C., Greenacre, M.J. (eds.) Data Analysis and Classification, Berlin: Springer.

23. [23]	Costanza, R. and Kubiszewski, I. (2012), The authorship structure of ‘‘ecosystem services’’ as a transdisciplinary field of scholarship, Ecosystem Services, 1, 16–25.

24. [24]	Freeman, L. (1979), Centrality in social networks: Conceptual clarification, Social Networks, 1, 215-239.