"Structuration" by Intellectual Organization: The Configuration of Knowledge in Relations among Structural Components in Networks of Science

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how knowledge structures evolve in scientific citation networks, measuring their organization and redundancy over time in interdisciplinary and stable fields using information theory.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify the structuration of knowledge in citation networks through configurational information and compares interdisciplinary and stable scientific fields.

Findings

Interdisciplinary fields show higher configurational information.

Stable fields exhibit more consistent knowledge structures.

Redundancy varies with the complexity of the knowledge base.

Abstract

Using aggregated journal-journal citation networks, the measurement of the knowledge base in empirical systems is factor-analyzed in two cases of interdisciplinary developments during the period 1995-2005: (i) the development of nanotechnology in the natural sciences and (ii) the development of communication studies as an interdiscipline between social psychology and political science. The results are compared with a case of stable development: the citation networks of core journals in chemistry. These citation networks are intellectually organized by networks of expectations in the knowledge base at the specialty (that is, above-journal) level. This "structuration" of structural components (over time) can be measured as configurational information. The latter is compared with the Shannon-type information generated in the interactions among structural components: the difference between these two measures provides us with a measure for the redundancy generated by the specification of a model in the knowledge base of the system. This knowledge base incurs (against the entropy law) to variable extents on the knowledge infrastructures provided by the observable networks of relations.