Evolution of Think Tanks Studies in View of a Scientometrics Perspective

摘要

The paper presents a scientometrics analysis of research work done on the emerging area of think tanks, which are regarded as a domain of information science. Research on think tanks started during the last century and in recent years has gained tremendous momentum. It is considered one of the most important emerging domains of research in information science. We have analyzed the research output data on think tanks during 2006-2016 indexed in the Web of Knowledge (TM) and Scopus (R). Our study objectively explores the document cocitation clusters of 1,450 bibliographic records to identify the origin of think tanks and hot research specialties of the domain. CiteSpace was used to visualize the perspective of the think tanks domain. Pivotal articles, prominent authors, active disciplines and institutions have been identified by network analysis. This article describes the latest development of a generic approach to detect and visualize emerging trends and transient patterns in think tanks.