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Measuring and visualizing the contributions of Chinese and American LIS research institutions to emerging themes and salient themes

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Abstract

Novelty and salience of the research topics are vital for the competitiveness of research institutions and the development of science and technology. In this study, two novel weighting methods were proposed to differentiate the emergence and salience of research topics. A methodology was constructed to measure and visualize the contributions of research institutions to emerging themes and salient ones. The methods were illustrated with the data of ninety Chinese and American Library and Information Science research institutions collected from the Engineering Compendex and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases between 2001 and 2012. The contributions of the investigated research institutions to the emerging themes and salient ones were calculated and visualized with the Treemap technique. The institutions were further ranked by their contributions and categorized into four types. The findings can help research institutions evaluate novelty and salience of their research topics, discover research fronts and hotspots and promote their research development.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the National Social Science Foundation of China (11CTQ025), National Natural Science Foundation of China (71373286) and the China Scholarship Council for financial support. We are also grateful to Qingling Pan, Li Dong and Jiajia Qin for collecting the controlled terms and keywords of the publications by the Chinese and American LIS research institutions in this study. Many thanks go to the anonymous peer reviewer for his or her invaluable suggestion on the revision of this article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management, Wuhan University, No. 299 Bayi Road, Wuchang District, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China

    Lu An & Xinwen Zhang

  2. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Xia Lin

  3. School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, No. 182 Nanhu Ave, East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, Wuhan, 430073, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China

    Chuanming Yu

Authors
  1. Lu An
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  2. Xia Lin
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  3. Chuanming Yu
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  4. Xinwen Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chuanming Yu.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 8.

Table 8 The list of investigated American research institutions
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Appendix 2

See Table 9.

Table 9 The list of investigated Chinese research institutions
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Appendix 3

See Table 10.

Table 10 Emerging controlled terms and their introduction years
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An, L., Lin, X., Yu, C. et al. Measuring and visualizing the contributions of Chinese and American LIS research institutions to emerging themes and salient themes. Scientometrics 105, 1605–1634 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1640-4

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Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification