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Ge SONG / The diffusion process of academic innovation 187

the study of structural holes distributed in 38 disciplines, so the diffusion breadth is 38 (see Table
2). Among them, each individual discipline has produced a lot of relevant outcomes, but most of
them only yielded a few related articles. This shows a long-tailed distribution indicating that the
subject diffusion follows power-law distribution.

Table 2. Research areas distribution of structural holes theory and adoption time
Number of Proportion of Adoption
No. Research areas (abbr)
papers total (%) year
1 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS (BE) 279 70.10 1997
2 SOCIOLOGY (SO) 47 11.81 1992
3 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (PA) 33 8.29 1998

4 PSYCHOLOGY (PS) 30 7.54 1999
5 INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE (LIS) 21 5.28 2005
6 ENGINEERING (EN) 19 4.77 2005

7 SOCIAL SCIENCES OTHER TOPICS (SOT) 18 4.52 2000
8 OPERATIONS RESEARCH & MANAGEMENT SCIENCE (OM) 17 4.27 2005

9 GEOGRAPHY (GE) 16 4.02 2002
10 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES & ECOLOGY (EE) 16 4.02 2002
11 COMPUTER SCIENCE (CS) 15 3.77 2005

12 ANTHROPOLOGY (AN) 15 3.77 1993
13 COMMUNICATION (CO) 8 2.01 1998

14 URBAN STUDIES (US) 6 1.51 2002
15 MATHEMATICS (MA) 6 1.51 2007
16 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY OTHER TOPICS (TOT) 5 1.26 2007

17 EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH (ED) 5 1.26 2005
18 CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY (CP) 4 1.01 2003

19 MATHEMATICAL METHODS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES (MM) 3 0.75 2007
20 GOVERNMENT & LAW (GL) 3 0.75 2007
21 AGRICULTURE (AG) 3 0.75 2011

22 GERIATRICS & GERONTOLOGY (GG) 2 0.50 2009
23 TRANSPORTATION (TR) 1 0.25 2006
24 TELECOMMUNICATIONS (TE) 1 0.25 2012