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Drawing impossible boundaries: field delineation of Social Network Science
[journal article]
Abstract "Big" digital behavioral data increasingly allows large-scale and high-resolution analyses of the behavior and performance of persons or aggregated identities in whole fields. Often the desired system of study is only a subset of a larger database. The task of drawing a field boundary is complicated... view more
"Big" digital behavioral data increasingly allows large-scale and high-resolution analyses of the behavior and performance of persons or aggregated identities in whole fields. Often the desired system of study is only a subset of a larger database. The task of drawing a field boundary is complicated because socio-cultural systems are highly overlapping. Here, I propose a sociologically enhanced information retrieval method to delineate fields that is based on the reproductive mechanism of fields, able to account for field heterogeneity, and generally applicable also outside scientometric, e.g., in social media, contexts. The method is demonstrated in a delineation of the multidisciplinary and very heterogeneous Social Network Science field using the Web of Science database. The field consists of 25,760 publications and has a historical dimension (1916-2012). This set has high face validity and exhibits expected statistical properties like systemic growth and power law size distributions. Data is clean and disambiguated. The dataset with 45,580 author names and 23,026 linguistic concepts is publically available and supposed to enable high-quality analyses of an evolving complex socio-cultural system.... view less
Keywords
information retrieval; scientometry; data; publication; social network; network analysis
Classification
Research Design
Free Keywords
Field delineation; Sociologically enhanced information retrieval; Boundary problem; Social Network Science (SNS); Web of Science
Document language
English
Publication Year
2020
Page/Pages
p. 2841-2876
Journal
Scientometrics, 125 (2020) 3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03527-0
ISSN
1588-2861
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed