Small-world phenomenon of keywords network based on complex network

Based on the network comprised of 111,444 keywords of library and information science that are extracted from Scopus, and taken into consideration the major properties of average distance and clustering coefficients, the present authors, with the knowledge of complex network and by means of calculation, reveal the small-world effect of the keywords network. On the basis of the keywords network, the betweenness centrality is used to carry out a preliminary study on how to detect the research hotspots of a discipline. This method is also compared with that of detecting research hotspots by word frequency.