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In the extant research on online knowledge communities (OKCs), little attention has been paid to the influence of membership fluidity on the coevolution of the social and knowledge systems. This article aims to fill this gap.

Based on the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) framework, this paper constructs a simulation model to study the coevolution of these two systems under different levels of membership fluidity.

By analyzing the evolution of these systems with the vector autoregression (VAR) method, we find that social and knowledge systems become more orderly as the coevolution progresses. Furthermore, in communities with low membership fluidity, the microlevel of the social system (i.e. users) drives the coevolution, whereas in communities with high membership fluidity, the microlevel of the knowledge system (i.e. users' views) drives the coevolution.

This paper extends the application of the ASA framework and enriches the literature on membership fluidity of online communities and the literature on driving factors for coevolution of the social and knowledge systems in OKCs. On a practical level, our work suggests that community administrators should adopt different strategies for different membership fluidity to efficiently promote the coevolution of the social and knowledge systems in OKCs.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the distributional characteristics and evolutional patterns in source periodicals, topics, authors, funding, and institutes of research papers in Chinese Agricultural Economics so as to understand the current situations and developmental tendency of Chinese agricultural economics research over the past decade.

Using the citation analysis method, this paper analyzed the distributional characteristics and evolution of source periodicals, fields, authors and topics of 2,203 highly cited journal papers from the database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and 189 cited journal papers from database of Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in agricultural economics first-authored by Chinese scholars from 2006 to 2015.

First, over the past decade, agricultural economics research in China has seen a rapid development. Specially, 103 scholars and 42 institutes have played key roles in the development, and 12 Chinese periodicals and 3 international journals have been the most influential outlets. Second, the coverage of the topics in Chinese agricultural economics research is broad and has expanded over the past decade. The rural land issue has been the most popular topic, while the issues regarding rural institutional arrangements and industrialization in rural areas have been explored extensively. However, issues in other fields, such as agricultural markets and trade, rural labor, food safety, etc. have to be further studied. Third, the improvements of economic theory and quantitative analytic techniques, the supports from research funding, and an increase in the collaboration between Chinese scholars and those from other countries have made great contribution to the rapid development of Chinese agricultural economics research over the past decade.

This paper is an original work that identifies the most influential journal papers including highly cited journal papers from CNKI and cited journal papers from SSCI, using citation frequency and standard Essential Science Indicators method. This is a contribution relative to the methods used by previous studies, which did not account for frequency of citation of a paper. Moreover, this study is based on data from two databases, CNKI and SSCI, suggesting that the coverage of sample papers is broader compared to those of previous studies.