Visualization of Citation Patterns of Research Articles in Environmental Engineering and Water Resources

摘要

Environmental engineering and water resources are applications of science and engineering principles to solve complicated environmental problems. These applications involve a broad scope of disciplines from basic science to applied engineering. Research articles published in scientific and professional journals are regarded as major media carrying knowledge of researchers and scientists and thus are used in citation network analysis to study knowledge flows in interdisciplinary research. The data used in this study are acquired from the Science Citation Index-Expanded database. Mutual citations of each journal are calculated to create both the citing (backward citation) and the cited (forward citation) matrices to investigate the trend of knowledge flows between the research fields. We use UCINET 6 to process these data and produce a representation of the relationships between these journals and fields. The networks of the citation analysis between fields show that the research in these two fields gained knowledge from 261 research fields and also disseminated knowledge to 239 research fields from 1995 to 2007. Evolution of core journals that played important roles as knowledge reservoirs in their respective fields is depicted based on centralities in citation networks. We find that these core journals did not nessasrily have higher impact factors than non-core journals and that the roles of the journals in a citation network changed more significantly with time than the impact factors.