Tracing 'Interdisciplinarity' using Time Series of Journal Maps: The Visualization and Dynamic Animation of Journal-Journal Citation Relations

摘要

Structural change-e.g., interdisciplinary development-is often an objective ofrngovernment interventions in science and technology. However, the dynamic analysis ofrnstructural change in the organization of the sciences requires methodologically thernintegration of multivariate and time-series analysis. Recent developments in multidimensionalrnscaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each timeslicernfrom the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and thus to locallyrnoptimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance in the animation.rnFurthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone allow us to show not only thernpositions of the nodes, but also their relational attributes like betweenness centrality.rnBetweenness centrality in the vector space can be considered as an indicator ofrninterdisciplinarity. Using this indicator, the dynamics of the citation impact environmentsrnof the journals Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animatedrnand assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved.