Abstract
Entropy, founded in 1999, is an emerging international journal in the field of entropy and information studies. In the year of 2018, the journal enjoyed its 20th anniversary, and therefore, it is quite reasonable and meaningful to conduct a retrospective as its birthday gift. In accordance with Entropy’s distinctive name and research area, this paper creatively provides a bibliometric analysis method to not only look back at the vicissitude of the entire entropy topic, but also witness the journal’s growth and influence during this process. Based on 123,063 records extracted from the Web of Science, the work in sequence analyzes publication outputs, high-cited literature, and reference co-citation networks, in the aspects of the topic and the journal, respectively. The results indicate that the topic now has become a tremendous research domain and is still roaring ahead with great potentiality, widely researched by different kinds of disciplines. The most significant hotspots so far are suggested as the theoretical or practical innovation of graph entropy, permutation entropy, and pseudo-additive entropy. Furthermore, with the rapid growth in recent years, Entropy has attracted many dominant authors of the topic and experiences a distinctive geographical publication distribution. More importantly, in the midst of the topic, the journal has made enormous contributions to major research areas, particularly being a spear head in the studies of multiscale entropy and permutation entropy.
Highlights
Entropy, making its debut in 1999, is a monthly open access journal, which mainly focuses on the studies of entropy and information
Of them are related to the topic of entropy in accordance with Web of Science (WoS) criteria, promoting the journal to become a miniature of this distinctive research domain remarkably
Its research areas would grow up side by side, and corresponding references can be synthesized in an accurate way. secondly, as an important part of the journal, interdisciplinary publications unavoidably need to refer to different kinds of disciplines, which contributes to the complexity of co-citation relationships; thirdly, an entire topic is even more complicated than a journal belonging to it, the topic’s labels are more difficult to summarize; and at last, as mentioned before, CiteSpace has a bunch of data sifting and slicing criteria, so that not all of the nodes and lines can be seen when visualized, which makes the topic’s networks relatively simple
Summary
Entropy, making its debut in 1999, is a monthly open access journal, which mainly focuses on the studies of entropy and information. This work summarized the journal’s attractive and prolific authors, as well as influential documents and synthesized the co-citation network of the references to demonstrate the journal’s research patterns and trends with the help of CiteSpace. Bibliometrics has been improved in steps and is quite helpful in discovering knowledge’s inner patterns and structures, widely used for studying the publications of journals or domains, so that applying it to this article is absolutely rational and irreplaceable. CiteSpace was chosen as the major software for visualization, because, in practice, it is easier to customize and can provide more valuable information than others, widely adopted for bibliometric studies over the world [37]
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