Do prestige and trust sustain knowledge-based communities? Evidence from Medical Ethics co-authorship networks in France. A micro study
| Date | 18 March 2019 |
| Pages | 281-302 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-06-2018-0155 |
| Published date | 18 March 2019 |
| Author | Sameer Kumar |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Do prestige and trust sustain
knowledge-based communities?
Evidence from Medical Ethics
co-authorship networks in France
A micro study
Sameer Kumar
Asia-Europe Institute, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to identify embedded communities among Medical Ethics scholars in
France based on their position and strength of association in the social networks they form.
Design/methodology/approach –The author constructed a co-authorship network by linking two authors
if they co-authored a paper. Once the co-authorship network was constructed, the author investigated the
entire network quantitatively using standard research methods known as social network analysis. The
author’s mechanism of community detection was via identification, i.e. communities were user-defined based
on topological analysis.
Findings –The study identified that communities formed by trust (bonding or repeat connections) or by
prestige (connection of well-connected scholars with those that are already well-connected) overlap each other,
suggesting that trust and prestige may go hand in hand in sustaining communities. Structural holes within
trust networks indicated that some actors played more of a broker role than did other actors.
Research limitations/implications –The study uses Web of Science field based category to extract data.
Although thorough cleaning of data has been performed, author disambiguation over a three decade period
remains a limitation.
Originality/value –Although there have been numerous studies on mapping co-authorship networks, there
has been limited work investigating the underlying communities formed by author associations. The results
of this study should be of immense benefit to those studying the science of science and S&T policy.
Keywords France, Trust, PageRank, Centrality, Structural holes, Co-authorship networks,
Knowledge communities, Medical Ethics
Paper type Case study
Introduction
Except for certain large science research labs where research takes place in teams (termed
“Big Science”), and the researchers themselves do not have complete liberty to choose their
research partners, scholarly research is a social phenomenon. Scholars’choices of
collaborators for a research endeavor are the cornerstone of the creation and sustenance of
learned societies. Research collaboration is an association between entities (authors or their
affiliations at institutional or country levels) to accomplish a research task. Co-authorship on
research papers is often considered a reliable proxy of research collaborations, and thus, has
been the subject of numerous studies gauging research associations.
This study has a two-pronged purpose: while attempting to investigate communities
formed due to research collaborations, it also seeks to answer some long-standing research
questions. Our central goal, however, is to discover communities of connected authors based
on whom they are connected with (prestige) and the weight of their associations (trust).
Social network concepts (Borgatti, 2016) are applied to detect these communities. Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 71 No. 2, 2019
pp. 281-302
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-06-2018-0155
Received 20 June 2018
Revised 9 December 2018
15 March 2019
Accepted 27 March 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
The study is supported by University of Malaya Project Number: RP020D-14AFR.
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Medical Ethics
co-authorship
networks
France’s Medical Ethics data set is taken as a case study to investigate the above issues.
This data set comes from a dedicated Web of Science (WoS) subject category of a country
that has been one of the earliest advocates of Medical Ethics. Besides, co-authorship
network analysis has rarely been carried out exclusively using a France-based data set.
Therefore, while carrying out community-based investigations as mentioned, professionals
and researchers in the Medical Ethics field would also be able to use the information
provided here to obtain both a macro and micro picture of the state of research and research
associations in France.
Literature review
Whereas ethics generally pertains to moral principles or values for conducting a specific
action, “Medical Ethics”encompasses an entire range of ethics (clinical, bioethics and
healthcare) in the training and practice of healthcare and scholarly biomedical research. For
a medical preparation or exercise to be considered ethical, it must follow the four principles
of autonomy, justice, beneficence and non-maleficence. Gillon (1994) argues that attention to
scope in addition to these four principles provides a simpler and more culturally neutral
approach to ethics in healthcare. Since the Hippocratic injunction, rapid socio-economic,
environmental, cultural and technological developments have necessitated that
professionals, scientists, policymakers and patients be abreast of the current legislation
and “good medical practice”norms. Medical Ethics addresses, among other things, a range
of issues from patient confidentiality and abortion to euthanasia and organ donation.
Several countries have their own code of Medical Ethics (e.g. the AMA Code of Medical
Ethics) and require that their members commit themselves to these values. Medical Ethics
committees in universities and research institutions require clinical trials, and those
involving animal and human subjects must adhere to the ethics guidelines.
France took an early lead in establishing a code for Medical Ethics, which occurred as early
as 1955 when a formal congress was organized by the Ordre National des Medecins, the
professional French medical association (Weisz, 1990). The French government adopted a new
code of Ethics in 1995, two years after the Ordre National des Medecins proposed it. The new
code had substantial amendments to the last code, which was first published in 1979. The recent
version (Edition Nov 2013) of the French Code is even more updated and comprehensive.
The document is divided into 112 articles with sections that include doctors’general obligations,
duties to patients, relations with doctors and with other healthcare professionals, medical
practice and miscellaneous provisions (Ordre National des Medecins, 2013).
France is ranked 13th internationally in terms of the number of Medical Ethics-related
papers (based on WoS (SCI/SSCI) total number of articles produced in the Medical Ethics
category). Several of the European nations, such as England and Germany, have produced a
larger proportion of papers in this field than France has. However, France, as mentioned in
the previous paragraph, has the distinction of being among the first nations in the world to
have considered Medical Ethics an important subject matter and issue.
With whom Medical Ethics professionals collaborate, and the kinds of communities they
form are interesting topics to investigate. Communities are clumps of connected nodes or
critical masses where dominant action happens. Though the researchers themselves may be
unaware, their associations form scholarly communities where highly connected or
influential authors interact with one another, leading to the diffusion of knowledge and
sustenance of associations in the network. It is, thus, interesting to reveal these
communities, which may be formed due to multifarious reasons, such as connecting to “star”
researchers or repeat associations. There are also authors in the network who play a
bridging role, connecting otherwise disparate communities, and those that exert influence
owing to their connections to already well-connected authors. The structural position of an
author in the network determines how influential he or she is. Several studies have shown
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