Abstract

This longitudinal study of the development of Spain’s ISI scientific domain examines three key time periods: 1990-1995, 1996-2000 and 2001-2005, with the goal of describing the basic structure and backbone of Spanish research, as well as studying its development over time. To this end, ISI categories are used as units of analysis, co-citation as units of measure, and pruning algorithms to simplify the relationship between categories in the visualizations. The results show that from the macrostructure point of view, biomedicine and materials science research provide the basic nucleus at first. Over the years this nucleus is consolidated and expanded with agricultural and soil sciences research. From the microstructure perspective, an increase is observed in the number of interdisciplinary categories, which occupy central positions, indicating increased interaction between disciplines that have traditionally been more important or visible and those on the periphery, or less well known.

Abstract

Citation analysis can provide us with models of the evolutionary dynamics in scholarly and scientific communication. We propose to distinguish between institutional research evaluation (usually, ex post) and knowledge evaluation ex ante, in relation to directionality in citation analysis. We discuss the theoretical literature on communication systems which distinguishes between information and meaning, in which the concept of redundancy plays an important role as measure of the potential of a communication system. This is the basis for a model of knowledge dynamics which differentiates between observable variation and latent selection environments. We use indicators at the journal level and analyze the citation environments of journals in both the cited and citing directions. Among journals, the citing direction can be analyzed by co-citation and indicates the integration of knowledge from different fields. The cited direction can analogously be analyzed by bibliographic coupling and represents the extent to which the cited journal has become relevant for different disciplines, hence indicates knowledge diffusion. We apply this analysis on three different case studies of journal-journal relations: a small scale study of the journal Public Understanding of Science, a random sample of 100 journals, and a large-scale analysis of the set of JCR 2016 journals. Combined, the results seem to confirm the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity cannot be captured by one-dimensional citation analysis. Both citing and cited directions are relevant for knowledge and research evaluations, respectively. We raise the question whether indicators of interdisciplinarity can be developed by combining both directions in citation analysis, indicate further research, and discuss the normative implications of our preliminary results.