TRACKING AREAS OF STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE USING SCIENTOMETRIC JOURNAL MAPPINGS

In science policy, it is often important to track emerging developments: new fields, fast-changing areas that are the focus of special funding efforts, or areas of growth or decline. This article presents methods to produce literature-based indicators for such areas using journal-to-journal citations. Using case studies of AIDS, superconductivity, and oncogenes, we posit that the inclusion of a new journal can be used as an indicator of structural change if the addition indicates the emergence of a new journal category. Using the cases of robotics and artificial intelligence, we illustrate the development of areas chosen for priority funding. Again using artificial intelligence, we demonstrate the importance of constructing even such simple measures of scientific performance as publication counts using dynamic rather than constant journal sets. Change in performance within a subfield can be systematically distinguished from change in the delineations among subfields over time.