Research collaboration and scientific productivity in the port management studies

Objective. The paper aims at exploring the scientific identity of port management research through the analysis the social structure of the international collaboration networks. In particular, it addresses how social structure of the seaport management research growth and evolve over time to explore: - The characteristics of authorship, authorship patterns, author productivity, ranking of authors; - The visualization of the co-authorship networks and density, connectedness and main component size of these networks. Methodology of the research. Descriptive and bibliometric analysis will be utilized to vet the evolution of the institutional collaborations and to delineate patterns in port research networks between 1973 and 2018. To increase the validity and reliability of the bibliometric analysis, the sample will include documents that provide certified knowledge generated by scientific journals applying a critical review process. Scientific journals belonging to WoS and Scopus databases publishing articles related to port-research will be taken into account. The assessment includes the general view of authorship, authorship patterns, author productivity, ranking of authors, visualization of the co-authorship network. Social Network Analysis (SNA) will be developed to identify and visualize the structure of a research community. Social networks have a crucial role to create and share knowledge and SNA has been developed to identify and visualize the structure of a research community in other contexts. A further activity will be the comparison of the attribute of the port study's network with those of other disciplines, such as management and organization, tourism and hospitality, with the aim of elucidating the structure of collaboration networks and to determine the level of consolidation and maturity of the discipline. Results/findings This study will show how social structure of the seaport research growth and evolve over time to explore the relationship between research collaboration and scientific productivity. Through a descriptive and bibliometric analysis, the study addresses the evolution of research collaborations and patterns in port research networks between 1973 and 2018. At this regard, the use of SNA will shed light on the degrees of density, connectedness and main component size of the collaboration networks. In particular, an important issue will be the analysis of the structure of these networks over the years and, thus, the role of the most productive and most "collaborative" authors. The emergence of few and dense collaborative networks in the last decade show the increasing importance of collaboration in port research. However, academics collaborate with their academic competitors in the "publication game", seeking career advancement through publication on high-impact journals, often less incentivized by requirements of decision makers working in the field of transport. Some critical considerations will be highlighted on research collaborative networks as knowledge creation locus and/or power and control mean. Finally, the characteristics of the port research collaboration networks will be compared with those of others mature disciplines such as business management, tourism and hospitality. Implication for research/policy The international collaboration network is dynamic, changing and very influential. As such, it feeds back into the national, regional, and local research systems. This dynamic organization presents particular challenges to policymakers that have to ensure that knowledge flows to critical places within the research systems. Dissemination of knowledge is widely recognized as critical to innovation. At this regard, the identification of the leading role of some authors represent important information for enhancing local attractiveness and finding ways to "tie down" the local knowledge to the international collaborative network. From the research perspective, important issues will be addressed on the relationship between research quality improvement, collaborative sub-networks, author's leading position and co-citation networks.