Olivares-Gil, Alicia, Arnaiz-Rodríguez, Adrián, Ramírez-Sanz, José Miguel, Garrido-Labrador, José Luis, Ahedo, Virginia, García-Osorio, César, Santos, José Ignacio, and Galán, José Manuel
[EN] Understanding the scientific and social structure of a discipline is a fundamental aspect for scientific evaluation processes, identifying trends and niches, and balancing the trade-off between exploitation and exploration in research. In the present contribution, the production of doctoral theses is used as a proxy to analyze the scientific structure of the knowledge area of business organization in Spain. To that end, a complex networks approach is selected, and two different networks are built: (i) the social network of co-participation in thesis examining committees and thesis supervision, and (ii) a bipartite network of theses and thesis descriptors. The former has a modular structure that is partially explained by thematic specialization in different subdisciplines. The latter serves to assess the interdisciplinary structure of the discipline, as it enables the characterization of affinity levels between fields, research poles and thematic clusters. Our results have implications for the scientific evaluation and formal definition of related fields., The authors acknowledge financial support from the and Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation Universities (RED2018-102518-T), the Spanish State Research Agency (PID2020118906GB-I00 and PID2020-119894GB-I00 via AEI/10.13039/501100011033), the Junta de Castilla y León – Consejería de Educación (BU055P20), Fundación La Caixa (2020/00062/001) and from NVIDIA Corporation and its donation of the TITAN Xp GPUs that facilitated this research. This work was partially supported by the European Social Fund, as the authors José Miguel Ramírez-Sanz, José Luis Garrido-Labrador and Alicia OlivaresGil are the recipient of a predoctoral grant from the Department of Education of Junta de Castilla y León (VA) (ORDEN EDU/875/2021). In addition, this work was also partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana via its Conselleria de Innovación, Universidades, Ciencia y Sociedad Digital, as Adrián Arnaiz is recipicient of a predoctoral grant. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Manzanedo, Dra. Saiz-Bárcena, Dr. Solé Parellada, Dr. Izquierdo and Dr. del Olmo for their insightful help to improve the manuscript.