Indicators of Structural Change in the Dynamics of Science: Entropy Statistics of the SCI Journal Citation Reports

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether changes in journal citation patterns, analyzed through entropy statistics, can serve as indicators of structural shifts in scientific organization, with implications for science policy.

Contribution

It introduces entropy-based metrics to detect and analyze structural changes in scientific fields using journal citation data from consecutive years.

Findings

Entropy measures reveal significant shifts in citation patterns.

Journal-journal mappings highlight areas of structural change.

The approach aids in science policy decision-making.

Abstract

Can change in citation patterns among journals be used as an indicator of structural change in the organization of the sciences? Aggregated journal-journal citations for 1999 are compared with similar data in the Journal Citation Reports 1998 of the Science Citation Index. In addition to indicating local change, probabilistic entropy measures enable us to analyze changes in distributions at different levels of aggregation. The results of various statistics are discussed and compared by elaborating the journal-journal mappings. The relevance of this indicator for science and technology policies is further specified.