Mapping Science - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 304

Fig. 8.20 The Scopus 2010 global map of 116,000 clusters of 1.7 million articles (Courtesy of
Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack, reproduced with permission)
Ismael Rafols, a researcher of Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU)
at the University of Sussex in England, Alan Porter, a professor at the Technology
Policy and Assessment Center of Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S.A,
and Loet Leydesdorff, a professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication
Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, have been
studying interdisciplinary research, especially topics that have profound societal
challenges such as climate change and the diabetes pandemic. Addressing such
societal challenges requires communications and incorporations of different bodies
of knowledge, both from disparate parts of academia and from social stakeholders.
Interdisciplinary research involves a great deal of cognitive diversity. How can
we measure and convey such cognitive diversity to researchers and evaluators
in individual disciplines? Rafols, Porter, and Leydesdorff developed what they
called science overlay mapping method to study a number of issues concerning
interdisciplinary research (Rafols et al. 2010 ).
Figure 8.22 shows a global science overlay base map. Each node represents
a Web of Science Category. Loet Leydesdorff provides a set of tools that one
can use to generate an overlay on the base map. One of the earlier papers on