Structures and dynamics of scientific knowledge networks: An empirical analysis based on a co-word network

摘要

Co-word networks are constructed with author-provided keywords in academic publications and their relations of co-occurrence.As special form of scientific knowledge networks,they represent the cognitive structure of scientific literature.This paper analyzes the complex structure of a co-word network based on 8,190 author-provided keywords extracted from 3,651 papers in five Chinese core journals in the field of management science.Small-world and scale-free phenomena are found in this network.A large-scale co-word network graph,which consists of one major giant component and many small isolated components,has been generated with the GUESS software.The dynamic growth of keywords and keyword co-occurrence relationships are described with four new informetrics measures.The results indicate that existing concepts always serve as the intellectual base of new ideas as represented by keywords.