Co-authorship and scientific productivity in the Port studies: A Social Network Analysis

The study focuses on building the co-authorship network of port research and analysing its structural properties through several Social Network's indicators in order to measure the strength of collaborative ties. Based on a total number of 1266 papers published from 1967 to 2018, the paper investigates authorship patterns, author productivity, followed by a presentation of co-authorship by periods, a discussion of main component and core authors by periods. Findings show the existence of different typologies of author-led research network, characterized by hierarchy of relationships centred on team leaders. Conclusions and future research directions are provided in order to investigate strategic citation behaviours in the academia, such as self-citations and citation clubs.