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Introduction
In bibliometric and scientometric research, a lot of attention is paid to the analysis of networks of, for example, documents, keywords, authors or journals. Mapping and clustering techniques are frequently used to study such networks. The techniques are used to address questions such as:
Q1. What are the main topics or the main research fields within a certain scientific domain?
Q2. How do these topics or these fields relate to each other?
Science mapping uses the networks of links between articles (citations, co-authorship), patents or other information items, to understand the structure of science (Börner et al. , 2003). The map of science can be used as a tool for science strategy and evaluation.
Science mapping has a long tradition that started with the work of Small (1973) and of others such as Marshakova (1973) and Kessler (1963). Since then, a variety of methods have been proposed, such as journal citation analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliometric coupling and co-word analysis. Based on the co-occurrence of pairs of words, co-word analysis seeks to extract the themes of science and detect the linkages among these themes directly from the subject content of texts. It does not rely on any a priori definition of research themes in science. This enables us to follow actors objectively and detect the dynamics of science without reducing them to the extremes of either internalism or externalism (Callon et al. , 1986).
Therefore, based on the above reviews, this article is intended to reveal the whole structure and correlation among topics in the field of informetrics with the aid of co-word analysis.
The steps of co-word analysis method used in this paper are as follows: data collection, data standardising, data mapping and analysis of results. We then conclude with a discussion of findings and suggestions for future works.
Literature review
The co-word analysis technique was first proposed to map the dynamics of science. In 1986, Callon et al. edited a book entitled Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology . This is a milestone work on co-word analysis. Since the publication of this book, co-word analysis has spread to researchers from not only France, but also the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, the USA and other countries. The process, measurement and interpretation of...