Who Is Working with Whom: Co- Authorship and Co-citation Networks in Agricultural Economics Literature on Central and Eastern Europe

The study analyses co-authorship and co-citation networks in Central and Eastern European Agricultural Economics literature from 1990-2013. Using a sample of 238 articles selected from 17 peer reviewed journals the results show that there has been an increase in collaboration between authors during the period with Western European researchers being the major co-authors with their CEE colleagues. The co-authorship network analysis shows the existence of scientific cliques as majority of the articles was written by a few authors. Centrality measures showed that authors with the highest number of publications are not necessarily central players in the network. Co-citation analysis result shows that authors who belong to cliques are the most cited, while the pagerank scores emphasized the importance of who cites an article as articles cited by popular authors had higher pagerank scores and the most cited articles were not necessarily the most important depending on who cites them. The results also showed that authors who work together cite each other more often thereby boosting scientific advance for their clique members. For young researchers in this field, it is recommended to publish with colleagues often and identify the key players in this network, try to work with and cite them so as not to be left behind.