In the previous sections of this chapter we visualized all the authors that wrote something about sharing economy and how much in total they wrote. Now our purpose is to know who the first 10 most cited influencers are and which field (academic, news or websites) they influence more.
Always starting from datasets gained in protocol [2.1] (text bodies, fields, authors, years), first of all we made a list of authors who wrote more articles and papers. Here we did not consider website authors because they are not relevant: expert journalists or academic researchers are the only cited in wherever. We took the first 56 authors from this list (those who wrote a considerable number of documents) and calculated how many times they were cited in the texts among all our three fields. To do this, before, we needed to have the authors written in the same manner in the list of 56 and in the text bodies, too: the solution was to make a Python script able to convert names and surnames of authors in the list and in the bodies, from whatever format to a unique format: namesurname. Once achieved this result, we could use an R script (using “tm” library) to count how many times each author has been cited within LexisNexis, Scholar and Google search text bodies.
The number of times the authors are cited was translated in three circles, representing one field each. This information comes out directly from the protocol just explained. We added, though, the information of the time in which each document was written by each author. This to see when these people was active. Another information displayed is the “Klout Score”, showing how influent they are on social networks in December 2015, according to Klout ranking. Finally to each person is dedicate an explanatory side, with additional information.
What comes out is, above all, the figure of Rachel Botsman, very active between 2010 and 2011 when she wrote the famous “What’s mine is yours: the rise of Collaborative Consumption”. After the publications of those years (some in collaboration with Roo Rogers), she wrote many articles and her TED speech made her popular all around the world. Another interesting author is Jeremiah Owyang, who is one of the most influent among websites (few times cited in papers and news articles) with a very high Klout score.
