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Abstract : |
Combined analysis of co-citation relations and words is explored to study time-dependent (?dynamical?) as-pects of scientific activities, as expressed in research publications. This approach, using words originating from publications citing documents in co-citation clus-ters, offers an additional and complementary possibility to identify and link specialty literature through time, compared to the exclusive use of citations. Analysis of co-citation relations is used to locate and link groups of publications that share a consensus concerning intel-lectual base literature. Analysis of word-profile similar-ity is used to identify and link publication groups that belong to the same subject-matter research specialty. Different types of ?content-words ? are analyzed, includ-ing indexing terms, classification codes, and words from title and abstract of publications. The developed methods and techniques are illustrated using data of a specialty in atomic and molecular physics. For this spe-cialty, it is shown that, over a period of 10 years, con-tinuity in intellectual base was at a lower level than continuity in topics of current research. This finding in-dicates that a series of interesting new contributions are made in course of time, without vast alteration in general topics of research. However, within this frame-work, a more detailed analysis based on timeplots of individual cited key-articles and of content-words re-veals a change from more rapid succession of new em-pirical studies to more retrospective, and theoretically oriented studies in later years., |
