Mapping Science - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 303

Fig. 8.19 A discipline-level map of 812 clusters of journals and proceedings. Each node is a
cluster. The size of a node represents the number of papers in the cluster (Reprinted from Boyack
2009 with permission)

Just as what we have described earlier in the topic about a geographic base map
and thematic overlays, global maps of scientific disciplines provide a convenient
base map to depict additional thematic features. Figure 8.21 shows an example of
adding a thematic overlay to the Scopus 2010 base map. The overlay superimposes
a layer of orange dots on clusters in the Scopus 2010 map. The orange dots mark the
papers that acknowledged the support of grants from the National Cancer Institute
(NCI). The overlay provides an intuitive overview of the scope of NCI grants in the
context of research areas.

8.4.2 Interdisciplinarity and Interactive Overlays

In parallel to the efforts we introduced earlier, researchers have been develop-
ing another promising approach to generate global science maps and use them
to facilitate the analysis of issues concerning interrelated disciplines and the
interdisciplinarity of a research program.