Tracing Competing Paradigms - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 200

activity; rather, it is part of an ongoing process. The relevance of a retrieved item
is linked directly to the substance of a subject matter. This view is in line with the
goal of mapping scientific frontiers, that is to provide a meaningful context in which
scientists can explore the body of knowledge as a whole, as opposed to deal with
fragmented pieces of knowledge. Domain visualization underlines the development
of a research theme in scientific literature.
Patrick Wilson, who is the recipient of the 2001 ASIS Award of Merit, regarded
the communication problem as one of communication among specialties rather than
individuals (Wilson 1993 ). The main way in which information from outside affects
a specialty is by being recognized by the group as being impersonally, objectively
relevant. It is a group as a whole that has to be persuaded that the information has
an appropriate logical or evidential status.
TefkoSaracevic suggests that the subject knowledge relevance is fundamental
to all other views of relevance, because subject knowledge is fundamental to
communication of knowledge (Saracevic 1975 ). The subject literature view of
relevance can be built around considerations of the structure of subject literatures.
The subject knowledge view of relevance stresses the nature, structure and extent
of the subject knowledge on a topic given by a question. Subject knowledge and
subject literature are not the same, but obviously related.
The influence from philosophy of science includes Kuhn's paradigm shift
theory and Thagard's conceptual revolution theory. In order to track the growth of
knowledge, we build on Bush's notions of associations and trailblazing information
spaces. A key step in our approach is to find concrete and quantitative measures
of the strength of association between intellectual and conceptual entities. Citation
indexing is another cornerstone of our work. The general acceptance of a theory or
a new piece of evidence associated with a paradigm is one of the most informative
indicators of how well a paradigm is conceived and perceived by peer scientists.
Citation indexing is now a well-established method, which provides this type of
information. Furthermore, citations to publications from subsequently published
works allow analysts to trace the origin of a particular publication and the impact of
an article on a topic.

6.2 A Longitudinal Study of Collagen Research

In a longitudinal study of citation patterns, Henry Small traced the development of
research in Collagen. Highly cited articles were grouped into clusters by co-citation
strengths. Each cluster was represented by a number of contour lines showing the
number of times they were cited in a particular year. Figure 6.1 shows such annual
snapshots.
By examining the patterns of movements of articles in and out across inner circles
and outer circles over years, Small identified characteristics that can be regarded
as signs of paradigm shifts. However, not only the thematic layer changed each
year, but also did the base map, i.e. the membership of each cluster. The trace of