This is an R project to create co-citation networks for the field of social network analysis and network science using Web of Science (WOS) data. The project was originally created for EUSN Visualization Award 2014. It won the award in June 2014.
The project uses co-citation networks to map the research field of social networks and network science across different disciplines, namely the social sciences, physics, and computer science. Each node is a cited author and each tie is a co-citation between two authors. The citing papers are all the publications in Thomson Reuters Web of Science that mention “social networks” or “network science” in their topic.
Using WOS categories, citing papers have been divided into two broad disciplines: the social sciences versus physics and computer science. I downloaded citing papers (just the bibliographic data) for the period from 1996 to 2013, and divided them into six 3-years time spans according to their publication date. This resulted into a time series of six co-citation networks. I created a network video to show the evolution of the co-citation network over these six time periods.
The project uses the R packages igraph, network, networkDynamic and ndtv for network analysis and animations. The whole project is public and reproducible on Github.