Small World theory in scientific cooperation network in the field of Iranian medicine 2009-2013

Background and aim: Small World is one of the existing theories in the social network analysis (SNA), which consists of clusters with local robust connections and a few global connections and shortens the distance between both two nodes of network. The aim of this study was to investigate the small world theory in co-authorship network of Iranian medicine. Material and methods: This study was conducted using Bibliometrics and SNA methods. Medicine word was surfed in WoS database only on Iran during 2009-2013 years. Finally, the status of this word was analyzed in terms of accordance to small world theory by drawing the co-authorship map. Findings: The results showed that more than half of researchers in this filed had communicated with each other and shaped a component in which the path length was 6.89 and the clustering coefficient was 0.85 and the index of Small World was 169.79, too. Conclusion: The relatively short length of path, high coefficient of clustering and also comparing the index of Small World with other researches indicates that there is a Small World.