Visualizing the Scientific World and Its Evolution

We propose an approach to visualizing the scientific world and its evolution by constructing minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and a two-dimensional map of scientific journals using the database of the Science Citation Index (SCI) during 1994–2001. The structures of constructed MSTs are consistent with the sorting of SCI categories. The map of science is constructed based on our MST results. Such a map shows the relation among various knowledge clusters and their citation properties. The temporal evolution of the scientific world can also be delineated in the map. In particular, this map clearly shows a linear structure of the scientific world, which contains three major domains including physical sciences, life sciences, and medical sciences. The interaction of various knowledge fields can be clearly seen from this scientific world map. This approach can be applied to various levels of knowledge domains.