Dynamic of Publication Network in German Photovoltaic Industry

Esmaeil Vasaf and Mahboobeh Sanatkhani

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Besides high policy-induced motivations for development of research activities in photovoltaic industry, there have been a few social network studies concentrating on the scientific publication in this field. This study tried to shed light on the structure and evolution of publication network in German PV industry from 1988 to 2013. For this purpose, using the centrality indices, I realized the most influential actors as potential source of knowledge and actors who play the central role in knowledge production and diffusion. In next step, I investigated the dynamic of co-authorship network of scientists. Results showed that against the downward trend of network’s cohesion, overall compared to the same size random generated network, German PV co-authorship network is characterized as a small world network which emphasizes the efficient diffusion of knowledge compare to other type of network. Finally, to disclose the drivers behind the evolution of co-authorship network, I hypothesized two different scenarios. First, using descriptive analysis, the existence of preferential attachment mechanism is investigated. Fitting power law distribution over degree of nodes rejected our hypothesis for all investigating time windows. Therefore, preferential attachment mechanism cannot significantly explain the evolution of the network and reveals that network is robust in response to removal of large nodes. Second, looking at the composition of knowledge on map of science provided strong evidence in support of interdisciplinarity nature of German PV industry. Our descriptive analysis shows that along with existence of leading macro-disciplines such as Materials Science and Physics Applied, new subject categories of science have found a significant position over the existing knowledge domain during the observed period.

Keywords: publication network; PV industry; knowledge diffusion; preferential attachment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ene, nep-knm and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/65453/1/MPRA_paper_65453.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/65696/1/MPRA_paper_65453.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:65453

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().