Subtheme : S3.6 Regional Innovation Ecosystems Title : Regional Development in South Korea: Accounting for Research Area in Centrality and Networks Authors : Matthew A. Shapiro, Min-Ho So, Young-Long Kim, Han Woo Park (Corresponding author) First-author Bio : Matthew A. Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Department of Social Sciences. His interests include science, technology, energy, and environmental policies, particularly in Northeast Asia. He has written several journal articles and book chapters on public-private R&D collaboration in the region, and he is currently working on a study of domestic and transnational environmental interest groups in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. Keywords : Network analysis; Korean NIS; centrality; density; fragmentation Abstract This paper provides a first-ever look at differences of centrality scores (i.e., networks) over time and across research specializations in Korea. This is a much needed development, given the variance which is effectively ignored when Science Citation Index (SCI) publications are aggregated. Three quantitative tests are provided – OLS, two sample t-tests, and unit-root tests – to establish the patterns of centrality scores across Korea over time. The unit-root test is particularly important, as it helps identify patterns of convergence in each region’s centrality scores. For all other geographic regions besides Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Daejeon, there appears to be little promise – at least in the immediate future – of being network hubs. For these top three regions, though, there is a pattern of convergence in three-quarters of all research specializations, which we attribute in part to policies in the mid- and late-1990s. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2010-330-B00232) Accepted for presentation at Triple Helix 9 International Conference (Stanford University, 11-14 July 2011) http://th9.triplehelixassociation.org. Copyright of the paper belongs to the author(s). Submission of a paper grants permission to the Triple Helix 9 Scientific Committee to include it in the conference material and to place it on relevant websites. The Scientific Committee may invite accepted papers to be considered for publication in Special Issues of selected journals after the conference.