Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mapping the intellectual structure of scientometrics: a co-word analysis of the journal Scientometrics (2005–2010)

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

959 full text articles has been studied to explore the intellectual structure of scientometrics in the period 2005–2010 using text mining and co-word analysis. The trends and patterns of scientometrics in the journal Scientometrics were revealed by measuring the association strength of selected keywords which represent the produced concept and idea in the field of scientometrics. All articles were collected from the journal Scientometrics through Springerlink (full text database) and keywords were added non-parametrically from the LISA database and the articles themselves (keywords provided by author). Other important keywords are extracted from the title and abstract of the article manually. These keywords are standardized using a vocabulary tool. With the objective of delineating dynamic changes of the field of scientometrics, the period 2005–2010 was studied and further divided into two consecutive periods: 2005–2007 and 2008–2010. The results show that publication has some well-established topics which are changing gradually to adopt new themes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • An, X. Y., & Wu, Q. Q. (2011). Co-word analysis of the trends in stem cells field based on subject heading weighting. Scientometrics, 88(1), 133–144.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Bhattacharya, S., & Basu, R. K. (1998). Mapping a research area at the micro level using co-word analysis. Scientometrics, 43(3), 359–372.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borner, K., Chen, C., & Boyack, K. W. (2003). Visualizing knowledge domains. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 37(1), 179–255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callon, M., Courtial, J. P., & Laville, F. (1991). Co-word analysis as a tool for describing the network of interactions between basic and technological research: the case of polymer chemistry. Scientometrics, 22(1), 153–203.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cambrosio, A., Limoges, C., Courtial, J. P., & Laville, F. (1993). Historical scientometircs? Mapping over 70 years of biological safety research with co-word analysis. Scientometrics, 27(2), 119–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coulter, N., Monarch, I., & Konda, S. (1998). Software engineering as seen through its research literature: A study in co-word analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(13), 1206–1223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Courtial, J. P. (1994). A coword analysis of scientometrics. Scientometrics, 31(3), 251–260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Courtial, J. P., Callon, M., & Sigogneau, A. (1993). The use of patent titles for identifying the topics of invention and forecasting trends. Scientometrics, 26(2), 231–242.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Culnan, M. J. (1986). The intellectual development of management information systems, 1972–1982: A co-citation analysis. Management Science, 32(2), 156–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, Y., Chowdhury, G. G., & Foo, S. (2001). Bibliometric cartography of information retrieval research by using co-word analysis. Information Processing and Management, 37(6), 817–842.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • He, Q. (1999). Knowledge discovery through co-word analysis. Library Trends, 48(1), 133–159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hinze, S. (1994). Bibliographical cartography of an emerging interdisciplinary discipline: The case of bioelectronics. Scientometrics, 29(3), 353–376.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hou, H.Y., Liu, Z.Y., Chen, Y., Jiang, C.L., Yin, L.C., & Pang, J. (2006). Mapping of science studies: the trend of research fronts. Science Research Management, 22(3), 90–96.

  • Kopcsa, A., & Schiebel, E. (1998). Science and technology mapping: A new iteration model for representing multidimensional relationships. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(1), 7–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kostoff, R. N., Stump, J. A., Johnson, D., Murday, J. S., Lau, C. G. Y., & Tolles, W. M. (2006). The structure and infrastructure of the global nanotechnology literature. Journal of Nanoparticle Research, 8(3–4), 301–321.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Law, J., Bauin, S., Courtial, J.-P., & Whittaker, J. (1988). Policy and the mapping of scientific change: A co-word analysis of research into environmental acidification. Scientometrics, 14(3–4), 251–264.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Law, J., & Whittaker, J. (1992). Mapping acidification research: A test of the co-word method. Scientometrics, 23(3), 417–461.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, B., & Jeong, Y. I. (2008). Mapping Korea’s national R&D domain of robot technology by using the co-word analysis. Scientometrics, 77(1), 3–19.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Leydesdorff, L., & Vaughan, L. (2006). Co-occurrence matrices and their applications in information science: Extending ACA to the web environment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(12), 1616–1628.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leydesdorff, L., & Zaal, R. (1988). Co-words and citations. relations between document sets and environments. In L. Egghe, & R. Rousseau (Eds.), Informetrics 87/88 (pp. 105–19). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

  • Looze, M. D., & Lemarie, J. (1997). Corpus relevance through co-word analysis: An application to plant proteins. Scientometrics, 39(3), 267–280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mihalcea, R., Tarau, P. (2004). TextRank: Bringing order into texts. In Proceedings of the conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP 2004). Barcelona: Spain.

  • Mohammadi, E. (2012). Knowledge mapping of the Iranian nanoscience and technology: A text mining approach. Scientometrics, 92(3), 593–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mooghali, R., Alijani, M. S., Karami, N., & Khasseh, A. (2011). Scientometrics analysis of scientometrics literature. International Journal of Information Science and Management, 9(1), 19–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Musgrove, P. B., Binns, R., Page-Kennedy, T., & Thelwall, M. (2003). A method for identifying clusters in sets of interlinking web spaces. Scientometrics, 58(3), 657–672.

  • Noyons, C. (2005). Science maps within a science policy context. In Handbook of quantitative science and technology research, (pp. 237–255).

  • Noyons, E. C. M., & van Raan, A. F. J. (1994). Bibliometric cartography of scientific and technological development of an R&D field. Scientometrics, 30(1), 157–173.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Noyons, E. C. M., & van Raan, A. F. J. (1998). Monitoring scientific developments from a dynamic perspective: Self-organized structuring to map neural network research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(1), 68–81.

  • Polanco, X., Francois, C., & Keim, J. P. (1998). Artificial neural network technology for the classification and cartography of science and technology information. Scientometrics, 41(1–2), 69–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ponzi, L. J. (2002). The intellectual structure and interdisciplinary breadth of knowledge management: A bibliometric study of its early stage of development. Scientometrics, 55(2), 259–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • R Core Team (2012). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org/. Accessed 4 Sept 2013.

  • Rikken, P., Kiers, H. A. L., & Vos, R. (1995). Mapping the dynamics of adverse drug reactions in subsequent time periods using INDSCAL. Scientometrics, 33(3), 367–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rip, A., & Courtial, J. P. (1984). Co-word maps of biotechnology: An example of cognitive scientometrics. Scientometrics., 6(6), 381–400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sedighi, M., & Jalalimanesh, A. (2014). Mapping research trends in the field of knowledge management. Malaysian Journal of Library and Information Science, 19(1), 71–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Small, H. (1973). Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24(4), 265–269.

  • Small, H., & Griffith, B. (1974). The structure of scientific literature I: Identifying and graphing specialities. Science Studies, 4(1), 17–40.

  • Van Raan, A. F. J., & Tijssen, R. J. W. (1993). The neural net of neural network research. Scientometrics, 26(1), 169–192.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wagner, C. S., & Leydesdorff, L. (2005). Network structure, self-organization, and the growth of international collaboration in science. Research Policy, 34(10), 1608–1618.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yue, H. (2012). Mapping the intellectual structure by co-word: A case of international management science. Web Information Systems and Mining, 75(29), 621–628.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Ying Ding (Associate professor, Department of information science, Indiana University, Netherlands) for her valuable suggestion.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India

    S. Ravikumar

  2. Mizoram University, Aizawl, Mizoram, India

    Ashutosh Agrahari & S. N. Singh

Authors
  1. S. Ravikumar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ashutosh Agrahari
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. S. N. Singh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. Ravikumar.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 List of keywords which are not noticed during year 2005–2008
Full size table
Table 5 List of keywords which have not been noticed during year 2008–2010
Full size table

Appendix 2: Status of keywords’ frequency during year 2005–2007 and 2008–2010

See Tables 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Table 6 List of 50 most occurred keywords during year 2005–2007 and year 2008–2010
Full size table
Table 7 List of most increased keywords during year 2005–2007 to year 2008–2010
Full size table
Table 8 List of all decreased keywords during 2005–2007 to 2008–2010
Full size table
Table 9 List of keywords which were newly noticed during year 2008–2010
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ravikumar, S., Agrahari, A. & Singh, S.N. Mapping the intellectual structure of scientometrics: a co-word analysis of the journal Scientometrics (2005–2010). Scientometrics 102, 929–955 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1402-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1402-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation