Abstract
We propose a series of methods to reconstruct and represent the evolution of a field of science at different levels: namely micro, meso and macro levels. We use a previously introduced asymmetric measure of paradigmatic proximity between terms that enables us to extract structure from a large publications database. We apply our set of methods on a case study from the complex systems community through the mapping of more than 400 complex systems science concepts indexed from a database as large as several millions of journal papers. We will first summarize the main properties of our asymmetric proximity measure. Then we show how salient paradigmatic fields can be embedded into a 2-dimensional visualization into which terms are plotted according to their relative specificity and generality index. This meso-level helps us producing macroscopic maps of the field of complex systems science, built upon the former paradigmatic fields and their articulations.
Highlights
Scientific activity can be interpreted as a complex process (Hull, 1988) that derives from a large scale interaction network made of a great number of heterogeneous actors: scientists, engineers, natural objects, journals, public and private laboratories, etc... (Latour, 1988)
We shall define a paradigmatic field as a set of concepts that reflects the structure of the activity of scientific communities
Our case study focuses on a set of concepts coming from two sources : a set of key-words associated to complex systems European projects extracted from IST Cordis database of FP6 and FP7
Summary
Scientific activity can be interpreted as a complex process (Hull, 1988) that derives from a large scale interaction network made of a great number of heterogeneous actors: scientists, engineers, natural objects, journals, public and private laboratories, etc... (Latour, 1988). Following Latour & Woolgar (1986), we consider that texts are among the major products of scientifc and that they make possible the coordination of millions of people distant in space and time As such the publications is one of the main communication medium for scientists. We shall define a paradigmatic field as a set of concepts that reflects the structure of the activity of scientific communities. We will present methods and tools for automatic bottom-up identification of multi-scale structure of paradigmatic fields and apply these onto a case study concerning complex systems science. This measure is based on mere statistics on occurrences and co-occurrences of words usages in a scientific database. We will propose a method to represent in an understandable way a large set of keywords which structure organizes an entire corpus
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