Dynamic animations of journal maps: Indicators of structural changes and interdisciplinary developments

The dynamic analysis of structural change in the organization of the sciences requires, methodologically, the integration of multivariate and time-series analysis. Structural change—for instance, interdisciplinary development—is often an objective of government interventions. Recent developments in multidimensional scaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each time-slice from the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and thus to locally optimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance in the animation. Furthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone allow us to show not only the positions of the nodes, but also their relational attributes such as betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality in the vector space can be considered as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. Using this indicator, the dynamics of the citation-impact environments of the journals Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animated and assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved.