The role of women scholars in the Chilean collaborative educational research: a social network analysis

Collaboration is an indispensable tool to promote and increase research. However, little is known about the role of women in collaborative efforts among educational scholars, especially in developing countries, such as Chile. We apply social network analysis (SNA) to examine the relationships and patterns that emerge from a dataset retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) of coauthored scholarly publications. Using sociograms and networks’ centrality indicators (density, degree, betweenness, and closeness) and bibliometric results, this study focuses on detecting the role of women in the collaborative networks. Our results show that the presence of women in the research space is stable across time, but they tend to collaborate more than men, acting as important bridgers since 2000, and that their contribution is relevant in promoting networking. This paper invites a reflection about the policies of research and gender, as well as the positionality of women doing knowledge on education.