Mapping The Evolution of Scientific Community Structures in Time

The increasing online availability of scholarly corpora promises unprecedented opportunities for visualizing and studying scholarly communities. We seek to leverage this with a mixed-method approach that integrates network analysis of features of the online corpora with ethnographic studies of the communities that produce them. In our development of tools and visualizations we seek to support the going back and forth between views of community structures and the perceptions and research trajectories of individual researchers and research groups. We here present results from tracking the temporal evolution of community structures within a research specialty. We explore how the temporal evolution of these maps can be used to provide insights into the historical evolution of a field as well as extract more accurate snapshots of the community structures at a given point in time. We are currently conducting qualitative interviews with experts in this research specialty to assess the validity of the maps.

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