Explorative Visualization of Citation Patterns in Social Network Research^*

Abstract

We propose a visual representation of bibliographic data based on shared references. Our method employs a distance metric that is derived from bibliographic coupling and then subjected to fast approximate multidimensional scaling. Its utility is demonstrated by an explorative analysis of social network publications that, most notably, depicts the genesis of an area now commonly referred to as network science. However, the example also illustrates some common pitfalls in bibliometric analysis.

Drawing impossible boundaries: field delineation of Social Network Science

“…Based on the description of Scott (2012) and other analyses of SNS (Hummon and Carley 1993;Freeman 2004;Shibata et al 2007;Lazer et al 2009;Brandes and Pich 2011;Freeman 2011;Hidalgo 2016;Maltseva and Batagelj 2019), the field is expected to have a social-psychological path with a strong graph-theoretical focus, a diverging ethnographical lineage, a structuralist narrative following the breakthroughs of White et al in the 70s, a development driven by physics starting around 2000, and a recent surge of research on animal social networks. These paths belong to different scientific disciplines with different styles of practice.…”

Using Visualizations to Explore Network Dynamics

“…Indeed, various forms of citation and coauthorship networks offer a wealth of reliable data with which to study the evolution of networks. New layouts and metric computations are constantly being developed from these dynamic network studies (Brandes and Pich 2012).…”

“…Other researchers have continued to focus on studying different properties of dynamic networks, e.g. the evolution of subgroups (Falkowski, Bartelheimer and Spiliopoulou 2006), effects of network topology and organizational structure over time (Kossinets and Watts 2006), detecting and predicting statistically significant changes in a network over time (McCulloh and Carley 2011), and new visualization methods using shortest-path computations (Brandes and Pich 2012).…”

Social Network Analysis: Bibliographic Network Analysis of the Field and its Evolution / Part 1. Basic Statistics and Citation Network Analysis

“…The development of the SNA field was reflected in a set of studies focused both on its historiographical description (Freeman, 2004(Freeman, , 2011 and bibliometric analysis of publications and journals involved in the field. Several authors studied citation structures of works and journals (Hummon and Carley, 1993;Leydesdorff et al, 2008;Batagelj et al, 2014), collaboration and co-authorship structures (Otte and Rousseau, 2002;Leydesdorff et al, 2008;Batagelj et al, 2014), structures of co-citations between works, authors, and journals (Brandes and Pich, 2011), topical structures and keyword co-occurence networks (Leydesdorff et al, 2008;Groenewegen et al, 2015). Attention was also given to different subfields (subtopics) of SNA (Hummon et al, 1990;Kejžar et al, 2010;Batagelj et al, 2014Batagelj et al, , 2019 and subdisciplines within the field (Otte and Rousseau, 2002;Borgatti, Foster, 2003;Lazer et al, 2009;Varga, Nemeslaki, 2012).…”

“…Using the dataset SN5 (Batagelj, 2008) presented by (2014) (Web of Science descriptions of articles on social networks till 2007) Brandes and Pich (2011) implemented the procedure of bibliographic coupling (based on closeness of nodes according to their citing patterns) to different sets of bibliographic entities -works, authors and journals. The analysis revealed the same patterns that were observed in previous studies: the distinction between different groups of authors -social network scientists and the representatives of Network science discipline -with the latter forming the most cohesive groups according to the similarity of citation patterns both in sets of works and authors.…”