The Structure and Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 165

viewed as statements relating concepts.” They are the technical foundations of the
contemporary quantitative studies of science. Each offers a unique perspective on
the structure of scientific frontiers. Researchers have found that a combination of
co-word and co-citation analysis could lead to a clearer picture of the cognitive
content of publications (Braam et al. 1991a , b ).

5.2 Maps of Words

The tradition of deriving higher-level structures from word-occurrence patterns in
text originated in the co-word analysis method developed in the 1980s (Callon et al.
1983 , 1986 ). Co-word analysis is a well-established camp in scientometrics, which
is a field of quantitative studies of science concerning with indicators and metrics of
the dynamics of science and technology at large. The outcome of co-word analysis
was typically depicted as a network of concepts.

5.2.1 Co-Word Maps

The history of co-word analysis has some interesting philosophical and sociological
implications for what we will see in later chapters. First, one of the key arguments
of the proponents of co-word analysis is that scientific knowledge is not merely pro-
duced within “specialist communities” which independently define their research
problems and delimit clearly the cognitive and methodological resources to be
used in their solution. The attention given to “specialist communities” is due to
the influence of the work done by Thomas Kuhn, particularly in his Postscript
to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . There are some
well-known examples of this approach, notably the invisible college by Diana
Crane ( 1972 ). The specialty areas are often identified by an analysis of citations in
scientific literature (Garfield et al. 1978 ). Co-citation analysis has been developed
in this context (Small, 1977 ; Small and Greenlee 1980 ). A general criticism of
the sociology of specialist communities was made by Knorr-Cetina ( 1999 ). Edge
( 1979 ) gave critical comments on delimiting specialty areas by citations. In 1981,
the issue 11(1) of Social Studies of Science was devoted to the analysis of scientific
controversies. We will return to Kuhn's theory when we explain its roles in
visualizing scientific frontiers in later chapters of the topic.
In 1976, Henry Small raised the question of social-cognitive structures in science
and underlined the difficulties of using experts to help identify them. This is because
experts are biased. Co-word analysis was developed to provide an “objective”
approach without the help of domain experts.
The term leximappe was used to refer to this type of concept maps. More
specific types of such maps are inclusion maps and proximity maps. Subsequent
developments in relation to co-word analysis have incorporated artificial neural