Current Status of Collaboration and Research Trend in Microbiology in South Korea

The objective of the study is to identify how researchers conduct collaborative work and which is the trend in the field of Korean microbiology using scientometrics and social network analysis (SNA) approaches from Korea-based microbiology articles. For the purpose, we use co-authorship as an indicator of the research collaboration network by analyzing 7,756 published sources from representative Korean microbial articles between 1996 and 2015. The results show that cooperation with different institutions is gradually increasing over time but the proportion of co-authorship within an institution decreased. And the average number of authors per paper is 4.928 during the last two decades in the Korean Microbiology Journal. Moreover, microbiology research trends in Korean have shifted with the passage of time from microbes and enzymes themselves to genomes, recombinant methods, proteins, bio-engineering, immunity, and molecular diagnosis. The significance of this study is that it is the first attempt to analyze the trends in Korean microbiology research using scientometrics with representative microbiology articles published by Korean scholars and using co-occurrent keywords to identify the research trend of Korean microbiology.