Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Identifying a better measure of relatedness for mapping science
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Topological analysis of citation networks to discover the future core articles: Research Articles
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Betweenness centrality as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
A new methodology for constructing a publication-level classification system of science
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Evaluations of context-based co-citation searching
Scientometrics
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In this article, we performed a comparative study to investigate the performance of methods for detecting emerging research fronts. Three types of citation network, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation, were tested in three research domains, gallium nitride (GaN), complex network (CNW), and carbon nanotube (CNT). Three types of citation network were constructed for each research domain, and the papers in those domains were divided into clusters to detect the research front. We evaluated the performance of each type of citation network in detecting a research front by using the following measures of papers in the cluster: visibility, measured by normalized cluster size, speed, measured by average publication year, and topological relevance, measured by density. Direct citation, which could detect large and young emerging clusters earlier, shows the best performance in detecting a research front, and co-citation shows the worst. Additionally, in direct citation networks, the clustering coefficient was the largest, which suggests that the content similarity of papers connected by direct citations is the greatest and that direct citation networks have the least risk of missing emerging research domains because core papers are included in the largest component. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.