Page 185 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

184 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

For data collection, this paper gathered the high-level research papers of structural holes theory
as fully as possible. In addition to Structural holes: The social structure of competition, other data
from the international authoritative citation index database Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).
A set of publications (only articles) related to structural holes were generated by searching the
term “structur* hole*” in the bibliographic field “Topic” of the ISI Web of Science database. It
yielded 397 publications from 1992 to 2013. Then, we generated the citation network of these 398
publications.

3 Empirical study and research results

3.1 Diffusion sequential network of structural holes theory

There are 398 documents as nodes and 2 241 directed links in the citation network of structural
holes theory. As articles can cite only articles that appeared earlier, the network is acyclic. We
order the articles by publication date. The diffusion sequential network of structural holes theory
are shown in Figure 1. Arcs represent citations; they point from the cited article to the citing article.
The direction of the arrow represents the innovation diffusion direction.

1992 1993 1995 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Figure 1. Diffusion network of structural holes theory with time dimension.

The overall trend of diffusion of the structural holes theory can be seen from Figure 1. Since
Burt proposed the concept of structural holes in 1992, there are more intensive literature nodes
appearing as the time closer to the starting point. Twelve relevant works published by Burt during