Identifying Influentials in Evolving Networks
Project by Johannes Putzke-Hattori between June 2015 and May 2017.
Description
In recent information systems (IS) research about social networks, particularly two streams of thought have attracted the attention of researchers:
- Analyzing the dynamics/evolution of social networks
- Identifying influentials (influencers, lead users, hubs, opinion leaders)
However, despite the vast amount of work on both topics, there is surprisingly little research that tries to combine both approaches, i.e. research that tries to identify (future) influencers in the early stages of the evolution of a social network.
Hence, main objective of the research project is to figure out how future influencers can be identified in the early evolutionary stages of a social network.
This research question is analyzed with four work packages: (1) Identifying Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in scientific publications, (2) identifying influencers in twitter, (3) identifying influential content creators on NicoNico, and (4) identifying opinion leaders in Wikipedia.