Methodology of System-Innovative Bibliometric Analysis and Mapping Scientific Literature

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the world scientific literature has seen a significant increase in the number of publications devoted to bibliometric analysis and mapping of bibliographic data on research in all sciences, including economics and management. A study of these works shows that they place emphasis on the analysis of publication activity and lexical and terminological analysis with an emphasis on authorship, sources, citations, etc. At the same time, it is difficult to find the attempts of searching for new research directions at the intersections of subject classification categories. This prompted the authors of the article to develop and repeatedly test a general methodology for system-innovative bibliometric analysis and mapping of scientific literature (SIBAMSL), for which there exist a reasoned subject classifications and a developed electronic database of sources. This article, based on the “from simple to complex” principle, describes the general scheme of this methodology and shows options for its application. We provide three versions of the JEL classification for 1886–1920 and version based on the ASJC classification and data from the Scopus system elaborated by Elsevier. The mapping capabilities are illustrated using examples of tables that show interdisciplinary relationships between publications and the construction of frequency cluster tables and maps of relationships between terms from titles and abstracts of publications in subject categories using the VOSviewer software. The paper describes briefly the long-term experience of applying the created methods and the results obtained in higher education and scientific economic research. An important point is to detail the problems with different types of publications and databases, which increase the uncertainty of the results of bibliometric analysis. We see the main result in the development of ideas of V.V. Leontiev concerning the construction of dynamic tables reflecting the links of between scientific subject categories according to leading databases of scientific publications. They give new possibilities for assessing new research directions in economics and other sciences.