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Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators pp 213–233Cite as

Science Mapping and the Identification of Topics: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

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Abstract

This chapter focusses on the drivers for the advancement of mapping of science and the detection of topics as often applied in scientometrics. The chapter identifies three different drivers for this advancement: technological innovation resulting in increased computational power, the improved community detection approaches available today, and advancements in scientometrics itself with respect to the actual linking of documents through citations or lexical approaches. We will show that the main drivers are the first two, with the last one somewhat lagging behind. Next, severe methodological issues have been identified in network science related to the application of these techniques for community detection. The resolution limit and the degeneracy problem are described. The last section shows how different approaches are taken to enable scientometricians to create global maps of science and how they come to comparable results at higher levels of granularity but that the validity of more fine-grained clusters and topics suffers strongly in the discussed problems, which raises serious questions with respect to the applicability of these global techniques with a strong local focus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECOOM, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Bart Thijs

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  1. Bart Thijs
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Correspondence to Bart Thijs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ECOOM and Faculty of Economics and Business, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Wolfgang Glänzel

  2. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Henk F. Moed

  3. Competence Center Policy – Industry – Innovation, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Ulrich Schmoch

  4. Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

    Mike Thelwall

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Thijs, B. (2019). Science Mapping and the Identification of Topics: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. In: Glänzel, W., Moed, H.F., Schmoch, U., Thelwall, M. (eds) Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02511-3_9

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