Page 192 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2016 Vol.42 191

to investigate the intermediary relationships carried by academic institution citation behaviors.
Issues of intermediary paths and patterns have been addressed while academic institutions play a
brokerage role during the process of knowledge exchange.
The field of informetricsis selected as the research area to construct the institution citation
network. The intermediary relations connected by institution brokerage roles have been extracted.
The potential regular paths and brokerage patterns have been recognized. The idea of institution
partition has been introduced. Significant path mining has been conducted, which contributes to
further knowledge discovery.
Data is processed by Python programming. The method of intermediary relation extraction is to
obtain triads connected by non-redundant relations. First of all, it identifies institution nodes that
accord with the characteristics of brokerage roles. Then it obtains all of the paths and institution
nodes that have been linked up by broker institutions. “Brokerage score” is used to measure
institution intermediary performance. The thought of institution partition has been introduced to
conduct path and pattern analysis. Institutions are classified into three levels,“strong”,“medium”
and “weak”,according to the value of P(Top 10%) of each institution. Each knowledge exchange
path between a pair of institutions corresponds to one kind of knowledge exchange pattern between
different levels of institutions.
Through intermediary path analysis, we found that broker institutions generally transfer
knowledge to institutions of the “weak” level, and institutions of the “medium” level depend more
on broker institutions to complete knowledge export. Three major knowledge exchange paths are
identified, among which the “medium→weak” path is the most significant, and then “weak→weak”,
and the third is the “strong→weak” path. Through intermediary pattern analysis, we found that
broker institutions of the “strong” level play the major role, both from the perspective of a single
institution and from the perspective of a group of brokers. Comparison within each level of the
broker groups indicates that the group of the “strong” and “weak” level tend to intermediate
with path “medium→weak” and “weak→weak”, and the group of the “medium” level tend to
intermediate with path “medium→weak” and “strong→weak”.
Among all of the paths that have been connected by the broker institutions, seven significant
paths have been distinguished. Institutions at the end of the knowledge flow have a potential
desire for knowledge exchange with the institutions at the start of the path. It has been suggested
that institutions at the end of the flow can strengthen academic communication with institutions
at the start of the flow, and collaboration can be promoted on similar research areas and
directions.