Revealing Research Themes and their Evolutionary Trends Using Bibliometric Data Based on Strategic Diagrams

Abstract

The paper aims to use strategic diagram technique to detect research themes and reveal their evolutionary trends in a scientific field using bibliometric data under practical application. Keywords are selected not only from author-provided and machine-indexed keywords, but also extracted from the full text so as to eliminate the "indexer effect". The keywords are then clustered to detect research themes, which are classified into four categories in a strategic diagram to reveal the research situations according to their strategic positions. Moreover, the strategic diagrams based on analysis of temporal dynamics are used to find out the thematic evolution through the similarity index to detect similar themes of adjacent phases, and the provenance and influence indexes to evaluate interactions of similar themes. Experimental results showed that the method is effective and useful in revealing research themes and their evolutionary trends in a scientific field.