IRMACS: The Interdisciplinary Colloquium: "Visualizing the Scientific World and its Evolution"

Abstract

The scientific knowledge of human beings is a complex and dynamic network. Understanding various knowledge domains and their interactions is crucial in documenting the history of our knowledge development, and could even reliably predict the future trend of our knowledge evolution. Moreover, such understanding provides objective guidance for allocating resources and efficiently promotes interdisciplinary collaborations.

We propose an approach to visualizing the scientific network and its evolution by constructing minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and a two-dimensional map of scientific journals using the database of the Science Citation Index (SCI) during 1994