Awesome

Social network and network science co-citations across disciplines in 1996-2013

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 the 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.
Citing papers have been downloaded for the period from 1996 to 2013, and divided into six 3-years time spans according to their publication date. This has resulted into a time series of six co-citation networks. A network animation has been created 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 for producing network animations.

All the original data as downloaded from the WOS are in ./Data/ in txt format.
The WOS search that produced the data is as follows:

TOPIC: ("social network" OR "social networks" OR "network science")
Timespan: 2011-2013. Indexes: SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI.

In the search above, 2011-2013 was set as the publication timespan. The same search was repeated for 5 more timespans: 1996-1998, 1999-2001, 2002-2004, 2005-2007, 2008-2010.

All the R code needed to extract the co-citation networks from the txt data files and to create the static (png) and dynamic (mp4) figures is in ./Script/.
All the code can be run from 00_main.R, which sources the other R files included in the ./Script/ folder.
Note that 00_main.R is also where you set the relevant path for your working directory: you have to change that path for the project to be reproducible on your computer.

All the figure and animation files are in ./Figures/.
In the figures (png), node size represents degree centrality, and edge width and color intensity represent the number of co-citations between two authors.
Node color represents the discipline in which an author is cited: (1) Blue authors are cited by papers in the social sciences; (2) Grey authors are cited by papers in physics or computer science; (3) Red authors are cited by papers in both the disciplinary classes.