Developmental tendencies in the academic field of intellectual property through the identification of invisible colleges

Intellectual property became a relevant academic cross-disciplinary field in an international context with the demand for the global governance of knowledge. However, the degree of consolidation of cross-disciplinary academic communities is not clear. To determine how closely related are these communities, this paper proposes a mixed methodology to find invisible colleges in the production of intellectual property. Scientific articles from 1994 to 2016 were extracted from web of science, taking into account the signature of the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights in the early 1990s. A total of 1580 papers were processed through bibliographic coupling network analysis. A special technique was applied, which combines algorithms of community detection and defines a population of articles through thresholds of shared references. To contrast the invisible colleges that emerged with the existence of formal institutional relations, a qualitative tracking of the authors was made 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 thematic modules related to the intellectual property field. Even though most are related to law and economics, there are weak linkages between disciplines which could indicate the construction of a cross-disciplinary field.