Abstract

The focus of this research is to identify social science disciplines that are more vigorously involved in collaborative research in an era that emphasizes collaborative research. Drawing on the example of Social Sciences Korea (SSK) program, this paper identifies the patterns of changing structure of academic research ecology and reveals the ways and the extent to which each discipline’s competitiveness, survival rate, position, and its accompanied role has changed. Basic statistical analysis and social network analysis are conducted on 33 agendas and 229 research teams that have participating in the SSK program for 8 years from 2010 to 2018. The first notable finding is that there are certain disciplines that perform the role of facilitator to nurture collaboration of various disciplines. Second, a group of disciplines are identified as leaders by having relatively higher competitiveness and viability. Third, the inner structure of the leading group takes an amorphous shape at the beginning and gradually transforms into a dual structure through structural differentiation. Moreover, we note that the mode of research performance is differentiated according to the characteristics of the major as well as its position within the overall research ecology: the “fox type” and the “hedgehog type.”