Social Innovation: Drawing and Analysis with Using Research in Scientific Base

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of social network co-occurrence and co-authorship of scientific documents of social innovation which are indexed in Scopus database. By using scientometric and network analysis techniques, the records were retrieved and integrated. It has been used a combination of software packages, including VOSviewer, Gephi, HistCite, Publish or Perish and NodeXL, for data analysis and mapping. Analysing all keywords shows that the most important keywords, based on frequency distribution, are innovation, sustainable growth and social entrepreneurship. Thematic mapping of the keywords using co-words analysis technique indicates that the topics innovation, social services and social change had top ranking in degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness indicators. The analysis of the co-authorship network of the field demonstrated that it is disconnected and sparse. Moreover, the total number of citations was 8,350. Mapping the knowledge structure of social innovation papers extracted from Scopus database could help to represent and visualise the thematic structure of research in the field of Social Science and Knowledge Studies and identify more specific research focuses within this field. It should be noted that in this study, the importance of concepts such as innovation, sustainable development and social entrepreneurship has been confirmed by reviewing the literature on these issues.