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of a fitness landscape provides an intuitive and yet sustainable framework for a
broad range of analytic studies concerning situational awareness, gap analysis,
portfolio analysis, discovery processes, and strategic planning. Traversals on a
fitness landscape characterize an optimization process. The traveler's ultimate goal
is to move to the point where the fitness reaches a global maximum. The fitness
landscape paradigm has a great potential not only in biology but also in many other
disciplines. It may help us address many common questions such as: where are
we in a disciplinary context? What would be the necessary moves for us to reach
our destination? Is it possible to find a path of consecutive improvements? To what
extent do we need to sacrifice short-term losses in order to maximize the ultimate
gain? Visual analytics provides a promising platform to address these questions.
Manfred Kochen urged every information scientist to read Science since Babylon
because it sets foundations of possible paradigms in information science (Kochen
1984 ). Sociologist Robert Merton and information scientist Eugene Garfield re-
garded Networks of Scientific Papers the most important contribution of Derek
Price to information science, which pioneers the use of citation patterns of the
publications in scientific literature for the study of the contents and perimeters of
research fronts in science. Particularly related to the theme of mapping scientific
frontiers, Price was a pioneer in proposing that citation study can establish
a conceptual map of current scientific literature. Such topography of scientific
literature should indicate the overlap and relative importance of journals, authors,
or individual papers by their positions within the map.
Generations of information scientists as well as scientists in general have been
influenced by works in the philosophy and the history of science, in particular,
by Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1962 ), Paul Targard's
conceptual revolutions (Thagard 1992 ), and Diana Crane's invisible colleges (Crane
1972 ). The notion of tracking scientific paradigms originated in this influence. Two
fruitful strands of efforts are particularly worth noting here. One is the work of
Eugene Garfield and Henry Small at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
in mapping science through citation analysis. The other is the work of Michel
Callon and his colleges in tracking changes in scientific literature using the famous
co-word analysis. In fact, their co-word analysis is designated for a much wider
scope - scientific inscriptions , which includes technical reports, lecture notes,
grant proposals, and many others as well as publications in scholarly journals and
conference proceedings. More detailed analysis of these examples can be found in
later chapters. The new trend today focuses on the dynamics of scientific frontiers
more specifically. What are the central issues in a prolonged scientific debate? What
constitutes a context in which a prevailing theory evolves? How can we visualize the
process of a paradigm shift? Where are the rises and falls of competing paradigms in
the context of scientific frontiers? What are the most appropriate ways to visualize
scientific frontiers?
At the center of this revived trend of measuring and studying science as a
whole, mapping scientific frontiers is undertaking an unprecedented transformation.
To apply science on science itself, we need to understand the nature of scientific
activities, the philosophy and the sociology of science. Our journey will start with
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