Teamwork makes the dream work! Collaborative networks in JPHMP

by Jon Scaccia March 29, 2022

My colleague and I are preparing an article on the use of social media to monitor vaccine outreach that we plan to submit to the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. Since I had the script up and already ready to go, I thought we’d take a quick look at collaborative networks, as reflected in this journal.

But Why?

Public health is collaborative. It just has to be. We know that by including diverse stakeholders and people with lived experience, we’ll be better able to respond to emerging needs and address upstream determinants of health.

But we also know that it’s super tough to write articles for peer-reviewed journals. I’m personally terrible at getting things out there. But, these tiny blogs are more my style.

I’ve chosen to look at the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice mainly because they represent a pretty good nexus between thought leaders, actual* leaders, and researchers in the public health space. First off, here’s who has published here the most. So congrats to Edward Baker.

Like all disciplines, people’s generativity can wax and wane over time, so here is a breakdown by decade.

People working together

Now, let’s take a look at collaboration networks. These are when people are listed as authors on the same paper, which conceivable means that they were working together on the same problems. Here are the top 250 authors. This isn’t bad. We can see lots of clusters of people working together, as well as connections between those clusters. So not many solo practitioners out there.

Broadening it out a little bit, here’s the top 500. Lots of great clusters here. I think pumped the number to the top 1000 authors, but the network started to fall apart. Those graphs really aren’t worth looking at.

But what about what people write about?

In future posts, we’ll go deep into the content of these articles. Or, you could just skip the line and sign up for PubTrawlr.

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