Twenty Years of Entropy Research: A Bibliometric Overview

Abstract

Entropy, founded in 1999, is an emerging international journal in the field of entropy and information studies. In the year of 2018, the journal enjoyed its 20th anniversary, and therefore, it is quite reasonable and meaningful to conduct a retrospective as its birthday gift. In accordance with Entropy’s distinctive name and research area, this paper creatively provides a bibliometric analysis method to not only look back at the vicissitude of the entire entropy topic, but also witness the journal’s growth and influence during this process. Based on 123,063 records extracted from the Web of Science, the work in sequence analyzes publication outputs, high-cited literature, and reference co-citation networks, in the aspects of the topic and the journal, respectively. The results indicate that the topic now has become a tremendous research domain and is still roaring ahead with great potentiality, widely researched by different kinds of disciplines. The most significant hotspots so far are suggested as the theoretical or practical innovation of graph entropy, permutation entropy, and pseudo-additive entropy. Furthermore, with the rapid growth in recent years, Entropy has attracted many dominant authors of the topic and experiences a distinctive geographical publication distribution. More importantly, in the midst of the topic, the journal has made enormous contributions to major research areas, particularly being a spear head in the studies of multiscale entropy and permutation entropy.