Title: Developmental tendencies in the Academic Field of Intellectual Property through the Identification of Invisible Colleges,
Abstract: The emergence of intellectual property as an academic issue opens a big gate
to a cross-disciplinary field. Different disciplines start a dialogue in the
framework of the international multilateral treaties in the early 90's. As
global economy demands new knowledge on intellectual property, Science grows at
its own pace. However, the degree of consolidation of cross-disciplinary
academic communities is not clear. In order to know how closely related are
these communities, this paper proposes a mixed methodology to find invisible
colleges in the production about intellectual property. The articles examined
in this paper were extracted from Web of Science. The analyzed period was from
1994 to 2016, taking into account the signature of the agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in the early 90's. A
total amount of 1580 papers were processed through co-citation network
analysis. An especial technique, which combine algorithms of community
detection and defining population of articles through thresholds of shared
references, was applied. In order to contrast the invisible colleges that
emerged with the existence of formal institutional relations, it was made a
qualitative tracking of the authors with respect to their institutional
affiliation, lines of research and meeting places. Both methods show that the
subjects of interest can be grouped into 13 different issues related to
intellectual property field. Even though most of them are related to Laws and
Economics, there are weak linkages between disciplines which could indicate the
construction of a cross-disciplinary field.