Hybrid citation-word representations in science mapping: Portolan charts of research fields?

Abstract

The mapping of scientific fields, based on principles established in the seventies, has recently shown a remarkable development and applications are now booming with progress in computing efficiency. We examine here the convergence of two thematic mapping approaches, citation-based and word-based, which rely on quite different sociological backgrounds. A corpus in the nanoscience field was broken down into research themes, using the same clustering technique on the 2 networks separately. The tool for comparison is the table of intersections of the M clusters (here M = 50) built on either side. A classical visual exploitation of such contingency tables is based on correspondence analysis. We investigate a rearrangement of the intersection table (block modeling), resulting in pseudo-map. The interest of this representation for confronting the two breakdowns is discussed. The amount of convergence found is, in our view, a strong argument in favor of the reliability of bibliometric mapping. However, the outcomes are not convergent at the degree where they can be substituted for each other. Differences highlight the complementarity between approaches based on different networks. In contrast with the strong informetric posture found in recent literature, where lexical and citation markers are considered as miscible tokens, the framework proposed here does not mix the two elements at an early stage, in compliance with their contrasted logic.

Trends in clinical reproductive medicine research: 10 years of growth

“…The combination of both has proven to be highly effective in representing the conceptual content of articles (13,14). We collected 47,667 different words that were corrected unifying grammatical variants and using only one key word for singulars and plurals, adjectives, and nouns, acronyms, and developed names of the same concept, among others.…”

Topics in dynamic research communities: An exploratory study for the field of information retrieval

“…They found that communities and topics are interwoven and co-evolving. Hybrid approaches can integrate different types of scholarly networks, for example, citation-based and word-based networks (Janssens et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2010;Zitt et al, 2011) and co-occurrence networks (Boyack & Klavans, 2010), but these studies were largely focused on providing more precise clustering results but did not address the interactive nature of research topics and communities.…”

“…Their hybrid approach can be employed as a good reference for journal categorization. Zitt, Lelu, and Bassecoulard (2011) examined the convergence of two thematic mapping approaches: citation-based and word-based. They found the two approaches yield quite different outcomes and cannot substitute each other.…”

A systematic method to create search strategies for emerging technologies based on the Web of Science: illustrated for ‘Big Data’

“…1 The framework of our search strategy for science Scientometrics combinations and classifications underlying search strategies are necessary for targeted scientific and technological domains (Thomas et al 2011). Citation-based analysis, as a means to identify a corpus of literature embodied in electronic records, is effective in identifying communities of researchers and research streams (Zitt et al 2011). At the same time, core journal search whose scope falls into the domain field should also be taken into consideration to help identify on-target research publications for a target emerging science or technology domain.…”