Mapping the backbone of science - IVL.pdfVIP

Jointly p ublished by AkadÈmiai KiadÛ, Budap est Scientometrics, and Sp ringer, Dordrecht Vol. 64, No. 3 (2005) 351ñ374 Mapping the backbone of science KEVIN W. BOYACK,a RICHARD KLAVANS,b KATY B÷RNERc a Sandia National Laboratories, A lbuquerque, NM (USA) b SciTech Strategies, Inc., Berwy n, PA (USA) c School of Library and Inf ormation Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN (USA) This paper presents a new map representing the structure of all of science, based on j ournal articles, including both the natural and social sciences. Similar to cartographic maps of our world, the map of science provides a birdís eye view of todayís scientific landscape. It can be used to visually identify maj or areas of science, their size, similarity, and interconnectedness. In order to be useful, the map needs to be accurate on a local and on a global scale. While our recent work has focused on the former aspect,1 this paper summarizes results on how to achieve structural accuracy. Eight alternative measures of j ournal similarity were applied to a data set of 7,12 1 j ournals covering over 1 million documents in the combined Science Citation and Social Science Citation Indexes. For each j ournal similarity measure we generated two-dimensional spatial layouts using the force-directed graph layout tool, VxOrd. Next, mutual information values were calculated for each graph at different clustering levels to give a measure of structural accuracy for each map. The best co-citation and inter-citation maps according