Abstract:

Understanding the scientific production dynamic, mainly, the relationships among researchers, groups, and institutions, is essential to promote policies that help to solve social problems through knowledge advance. Scientific Collaboration Networks (SCNs) are defined as a process in which the joint work of different people looks for a shared objective. SCNs allows understanding the cooperation and integration of knowledge through the analysis of a common phenomenon from different perspectives. These networks have been boosted by the increase of academic mobility and the improvement of the communication systems. In social sciences, collaboration work intersects two fundamental factors that impact SCNs´ membership. The first one is the epistemological-methodological relation with the phenomenon of interest, and the second is the paradigmatic research purpose and its character as either cognitive deductive, inductive, or emancipatory.

In Ecuador, scientific production in social sciences represented 12.16% of the total national production, in 2008. In previous research, the evidence suggests a tendency to grow, to multi-authorship, and publications with inter-institutional collaboration at local and national levels. Furthermore, it was found that 77% of the publications have two or more author, and 68% of this percentage have at least one international author, while just 32% remains as fully national authorship.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the SCNs in social science for the Universities of Ecuador. For this, 2952 publications, from 48 universities of the country, were identified. These publications came from databases such as WOS, SCOPUS, and SCIELO, from 2013 to 2018. Variables such as the affiliation and main bibliographic characteristics were examined. Thus, the data were grouped by universities, and then, the collaborative networks arisen from each one were analyzed through techniques for data and text management. Moreover, algorithms implemented in Python were used to process, organize, and classify the authors´ affiliations in different networks that create the final SCNs.

The results obtained demonstrate the collaborative tendency in each one of the Ecuadorian universities. Two or more authors make seventy-four percent of the publications analyzed. All Universities perform national or international collaboration in the elaboration of at least one of their papers of analysis. Then, two critical statements arise: First, regarding international peers, Spanish universities are the main cooperators of Social Sciences production in Ecuador, followed by the United States and Cuban institutions. These links have contributed to the SCN for Ecuadorian international representation, embracing institutions from 39 countries. Secondly, regarding the cooperation among Ecuadorian universities, the SCN is represented by all the 48 institutions. Consequently, the tendency is higher to international cooperation rather than the national one, for scientific publications. All these collaborative relationships with the participation of national and international authors and researchers constitute the Ecuadorian Scientific Collaborative Network for social sciences, becoming a significant initial contribution to a deeper comprehension of the participative dynamic in the field, considering both across and within institutions´ relations.

Keywords:

Scientific collaboration networks, Ecuadorian universities, scientific production, social sciences (SS).