A new methodology for constructing a publication-level classification system of science

By Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2012

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Classifying journals or publications into research areas is an essential element of many bibliometric analyses. Classification usually takes place at the level of journals, where the Web of Science subject categories are the most popular classification system. However, journal-level classification systems have two important limitations: They offer only a limited amount of detail, and they have difficulties with multidisciplinary journals. To avoid these limitations, we introduce a new methodology for constructing classification systems at the level of individual publications. In the proposed methodology, publications are clustered into research areas based on citation relations. The methodology is able to deal with very large numbers of publications. We present an application in which a classification system is produced that includes almost 10 million publications. Based on an extensive analysis of this classification system, we discuss the strengths and the limitations of the proposed methodology. Important strengths are the transparency and relative simplicity of the methodology and its fairly modest computing and memory requirements. The main limitation of the methodology is its exclusive reliance on direct citation relations between publications. The accuracy of the methodology can probably be increased by also taking into account other types of relations–for instance, based on bibliographic coupling. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e44cf9c68836c7ac7b0b5757435ee25bda480af7

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Citations in the corpus

CitNetExplorer: A new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks (2014, methodology): “The clustering technique used by CitNetExplorer is documented in an earlier paper (Waltman & Van Eck, 2012).”
Measuring Scholarly Impact (2014, methodology): “Another approach is to use so called resolutionfree methods with a tunable resolution parameter (Traag, Van Dooren, & Nesterov, 2011; Waltman & Eck, 2012).”
A smart local moving algorithm for large-scale modularity-based community detection (2013, methodology): “This network is similar to the citation network that we studied in an earlier paper (Waltman & Van Eck, 2012).”
From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities (2018, background): “Similarly, in citation networks, such as the Web of Science network, nodes in a community are usually considered to share a common topic 26,27 .”
Citation-based clustering of publications using CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer (2017, methodology): “VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks.”
Which Type of Citation Analysis Generates the Most Accurate Taxonomy of Scientific and Technical Knowledge? (2015, methodology): “In fact, the first taxonomy covering all of science using direct citation was not created until nearly 40 years later, by Waltman & van Eck (2012).”