Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Department of Education and Psychology, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of Information Science, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Background and Objectives: The researchers and their researches need to be evaluated to recognize each one's strengths and weaknesses. Then, it is possible to invest and make scientific policies on long term and short-term goals in this field. So far, several indices have been presented for evaluating researchers, each of which merely emphasizes a particular aspect of evaluation, and each has its own deficiencies. Recently, a model has been proposed by Cuellar et al. (2016) titled "Scholarly capital model", which examines the various aspects of the scholarly activities of a researcher. They define the model of scholarly influence as "the ability of a researcher to include his thoughts in the works of other researchers" or "the extent to which a researcher influences his own research field". The purpose of this research was to evaluate the researches in the field of distance education indexed on the WOS database using the scholarly capital model.
Methodology: The present study is an applied study that has been conducted by social network analysis. The research population consists all the documents published in the field of distance education. The results of search strategy retrieved 31607 records. The co-authorship symmetric matrices was extracted. Subsequently, using the UCINET software, the centrality indices were calculated. After analyzing all the indices using Amos and Lisrel software, we examined and tested the research hypotheses and fitted the model.
Findings: The results indicate the direct and significant effect of the social influence on the ideational influence, and the hypothesis is confirmed according to the path coefficient of 0.95 and the t-statistic of 45.9 at the significance level of 0.05. In the research model, K2 has degrees of freedom (df) of 3.97, which is less than 5. Also, the root mean square error of the approximation is 0.032 and less than 0.08. Given that the incremental growth index, normed fit index, non-normed fit index and comparative fit index are higher than 0.90, then the model shows acceptable fit and is therefore confirmed. The results also show the direct and inevitable significant effect of the social influence on the venue influence, and the hypothesis is confirmed with a path coefficient of 0.70 and a T-value of 27.12 at the 0.05 level. In the research model, the K2 value has df of 92.4 and less than 5. Also, the root mean square error of the approximation was 0.016 and less than 0.08. Given that the incremental fitness index, normed fit index, non-normed fit index, and comparative fit index are all higher than 0.90, then the model is acceptable and validated. The results of the third hypothesis of the research and the structural relationships between the variables of the research model - using structural equation modeling - indicate the direct and inevitable significant effect of the venue influence on the ideational influence, with a path coefficient of 0.84 and a T-value of 5.93 at the 0.05 level (because (t) is outside the range of 1.96 to -1.96). In the research model, the K2 value is 0.063 and less than 5. Also, the root mean square error of the approximation is 0.033, which is less than 0.08. Given that the incremental growth index, normed fit index, non-normed fit index, and comparative fit index are more than 0.90, then the model shows an acceptable fit.
Discussion: The results of data analysis shows that there is a significant relationship between the variables of this research. This relationship can be due to the fact that researchers with stronger social interactions can contribute better than other researchers to the field and may increase the quality of the works. Also, they are in a better position in terms of co-authorship and its indices. Furthermore, social influence has a positive and significant effect on the ideational influence. The existence of such a relationship can be explained by the fact that researchers who have stronger social interactions can work better with other researchers and may consequently increase the quality of the works; hence, they are in a better position in terms of co-authorship and its indices. The results also show that there is a significant relationship between social influence and venue influence. In other words, higher researchers with higher social influences have better venue influences. The confirmation of the relationship between the social influence and the venue influence is also largely justifiable, since a significant portion of the validity of each journal comes from scholars who send their research papers to those journals, and if the quality of these studies is rich and appropriate, they absorb citations and thus increase the credibility of the journal
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