Visual representation of knowledge networks: A social network analysis of hospitality research domain

Intellectual relationships and collaboration networks are the basis for the development of a knowledge domain. The visual representation of such "knowledge networks" contributes to the overall understanding of intellectual collaborations in a particular knowledge domain. Based on the co-authorship data from recent journal publications over a period of five years. the authors applied social network analysis to explore the network structures and identify their network properties in the hospitality research domain. The analysis revealed the core and peripheral networks where the power law distribution was observed on the pattern of publishing academic papers. The overall network was further examined by nine research streams in both "global" and "contextual" views to understand a broad variety of the collaboration patterns of hospitality researchers. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.