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Patterns of connections and movements in dual‐map overlays: A new method of publication portfolio analysis
Author(s) -
Chen Chaomei,
Leydesdorff Loet
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.22968
Subject(s) - portfolio , computer science , dual (grammatical number) , field (mathematics) , modern portfolio theory , data science , overlay , thematic map , citation , position (finance) , function (biology) , operations research , data mining , world wide web , business , geography , cartography , mathematics , finance , evolutionary biology , pure mathematics , biology , programming language , art , literature
Portfolio analysis of the publication profile of a unit of interest, ranging from individuals and organizations to a scientific field or interdisciplinary programs, aims to inform analysts and decision makers about the position of the unit, where it has been, and where it may go in a complex adaptive environment. A portfolio analysis may aim to identify the gap between the current position of an organization and a goal that it intends to achieve or identify competencies of multiple institutions. We introduce a new visual analytic method for analyzing, comparing, and contrasting characteristics of publication portfolios. The new method introduces a novel design of dual‐map thematic overlays on global maps of science. Each publication portfolio can be added as one layer of dual‐map overlays over 2 related, but distinct, global maps of science: one for citing journals and the other for cited journals. We demonstrate how the new design facilitates a portfolio analysis in terms of patterns emerging from the distributions of citation threads and the dynamics of trajectories as a function of space and time. We first demonstrate the analysis of portfolios defined on a single source article. Then we contrast publication portfolios of multiple comparable units of interest; namely, colleges in universities and corporate research organizations. We also include examples of overlays of scientific fields. We expect that our method will provide new insights to portfolio analysis.