A bibliometric approach to finding fields that co-evolved with information technology

Abstract

Abstract Among the declining industries, for example music industry, some have been revived by information technology (IT). At the same time, in academic fields, some have expected co-evolutions between IT and other fields to cause the resurgence of either field. In this research, the clustering of citation networks with 14,438 academic papers resulted in the identification of 28 academic fields in the areas “Computer Science” or “Information Science and Library Science.” Co-evolutions between these 28 fields and citing fields to the 28 fields were evaluated by an investigation of contents; a methodology to search co-evolutions was also proposed. This paper proposes that pairs of academic fields (with both high correlation and high dissimilarity) co-evolve, and some co-evolving pairs of academic fields were found. This research contributes to the discovery of the co-evolution between academic fields.