Gregory Khvatsky

In this paper, we answer the multiple calls for systematic analysis of paradigms and subdisciplines in political science—the search for coherence within a fragmented field. We collected a large dataset of over seven hundred thousand writings in political science from Web of Science since 1946. We found at least two waves of political science development, from behaviorism to new institutionalism. Political science appeared to be more fragmented than literature suggests—instead of ten subdisciplines, we found 66 islands. However, despite fragmentation, there is also a tendency for integration in contemporary political science, as revealed by co-existence of several paradigms and coherent and interconnected topics of the “canon of political science,” as revealed by the core-periphery structure of topic networks. This was the first large-scale investigation of the entire political science field, possibly due to newly developed methods of bibliometric network analysis: temporal bibliometric analysis and island methods of clustering. Methodological contribution of this work to network science is evaluation of islands method of network clustering against a hierarchical cluster analysis for its ability to remove misleading information, allowing for a more meaningful clustering of large weighted networks.

In this paper, we examine the contribution of Network Science journal to the network science discipline. We do so from two perspectives. First, expanding the existing taxonomy of article contribution, we examine trends in theory testing, theory building, and new method development within the journal’s articles. We find that the journal demands a high level of theoretical contribution and methodological rigor. High levels of theoretical and methodological contribution become significant predictors of article citation rates. Second, we look at the composition of the studies in Network Science and determine that the journal has already established a solid “hard core” for the new discipline.