Dynamics of senses of new physics discourse: Co-keywords analysis

• Published in: Journal of informetrics Vol. 16; no. 1; p. 101245
• Main Authors: Katchanov, Yurij L., Markova, Yulia V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-02-2022
• Subjects: Co-occurrence analysis; INSPIRE; Keywords; New physics; Co-occurrence analysis; New physics; Keywords; INSPIRE
• ISSN: 1751-1577; 1875-5879
• DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2021.101245

•The physics sense is a space of keywords that co-occur in the same documents.•The senses studied by their dimension and their trajectory mutual information.•The trajectory mutual information distributed according to a Frechet distribution.
The paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of new physics keywords co-occurrence patterns. For that, we explore the documents indexed in the INSPIRE database from 1989 to 2018. Our purpose is to quantify the knowledge structure of the fast-growing subfield of new physics. The development of a novel approach to keywords co-occurrence analysis is the main point of the paper. In contrast to traditional co-keyword network analysis, we investigate structures that unite physics concepts in different documents and bind different documents with the same physics concepts. We consider the structures that reveal relationships among concepts as topological and call them “physics senses”. Based on the notion of trajectory mutual information, the paper offers clustering of physics senses, determines their period of life, and constructs a classification of senses’ “authority”.