Yesterday’s giants and invisible colleges of today. A study on the ‘knowledge transfer’ scientific domain

Alberto Gherardini () and Alberto Nucciotti
Additional contact information
Alberto Gherardini: Università degli Studi di Firenze
Alberto Nucciotti: Università degli Studi di Firenze

Scientometrics, 2017, vol. 112, issue 1, No 13, 255-271

Abstract: Abstract Despite ‘knowledge transfer’ emerged as a separate field of study at least three decades ago, its academic literature remains rather fragmented. To reduce complexity, several journals’ special issues have attempted to frame up the literature both in a qualitative way and in a quantitative manner. Although these reviews help to bring some order to a flourishing literature, the theoretical background of knowledge transfer field of study still needs clarification. Who are their foremost scholars? How do they gather in visible or invisible colleges? How far the scientific communities of such domain have evolved over time? Has the knowledge transfer topic gained the status of an independent scientific domain? This article aims at shedding light on the knowledge transfer domain by mapping the invisible colleges on which the discipline is based. Drawing evidence from a network analysis of the backwards citations of the second generation of knowledge transfer studies, the authors point out that although the entire scientific domain has reached a strongly connected international dimension, it still manifests a persistent fragmentation. The paradoxical presence of a popular scientific domain without a proper independent theoretical body is consequently underlined.

Keywords: Knowledge transfer; University-industry relations; Invisible colleges; Innovation studies; Network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-017-2394-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:112:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2394-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2394-y

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().