The Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 2

1.1 Scientific Frontiers

The pioneering innovators in the study of invisible colleges were Nick Mullins,
Susan Crawford, and other sociologists of science. In 1972, Diana Crane argues
scientific knowledge is diffused through invisible colleges (Crane 1972 ). The prob-
lems of scientific communication can be understood in terms of interaction between
a complex and volatile research front and a stable and much less flexible information
communication system. The research front creases new knowledge; the formal
communication system evaluates it and disseminates it beyond the boundaries of
the research area that produced it. The research front is continually evolving and
updating its own directions. This dynamics makes it challenging for anyone to
keep abreast of the current state of a research area solely through scholarly articles
circulated in the formal communication system. Research in information science
and scholarly communication has shown that when scientists experience difficulties
in finding information through formal communication channels, a common reason
is the lack of a broader context of where a particular piece of information belongs
in a relatively unfamiliar area.
Philosophy of science and sociology of science, two long established fields of
studies, provide high-level theories and interpretations of the dynamics of science
and scientific frontiers. In contrast, scientometrics is the quantitative study of
science. Its goal is to identify and make sense of empirical patterns that can shed
light on how science functions. Typically, scientometric studies have relied on
scientific literature, notably Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, Elsevier's Scopus,
and Google Scholar, patents, awards made by federal government agencies, and,
more recently, social media sources such as Twitter.
Mapping scientific frontiers aims to externalize the big picture of science. Its
origin can be easily traced back to the pioneering work of Eugene Garfield on
historgraphics of citation, Belver Griffith and Henry Small on document co-citation
analysis, and Howard White on author co-citation analysis. Today, researchers have
many more options of science mapping software than just 5 years ago. Many of
the major science mapping software applications are freely accessible. Notable
examples include our own software CiteSpace (2003), the Science of Science Tool
(SCI2) (2009) from Indiana University, VOSViewer from the Netherlands (2010),
SciMAT (2012) from Spain. If we can only pick one software that has made the
most substantial contribution to the widespread interest of network visualization, I
would choose Pajek. It was probably the first freely available software system for
visualizing large-scale networks. It has inspired many subsequent efforts towards
the development and maintenance of science mapping software tools. Although new
generation of systems such as Gephi have various new features, Pajek has earned
a unique position in giving many researchers the first taste of visualizing a large
network.
Mapping scientific frontiers takes more than presenting an intuitively designed
and spectacularly rendered big picture of science. A key question is how one
can identify information that is not only meaningful, but also actionable. The