A social network analysis of the co-authorship network of the Australasian Conference of Information Systems from 1990 to 2006

Using bibliographic data extracted from an Endnote database, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse a network of co-authors with the aim of developing an understanding of the research community that produces the research knowledge published by the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS). The ACIS community was found to be a healthy small-world community that kept evolving in order to provide an environment that supports collaboration and sharing of ideas between researchers. It was also found that, unlike a similar analysis of the European Conference (ECIS), the Australasian scene was not dominated by a couple of key researchers as quite a significant number of popular researchers were identified.