Visualization Study Of Reseach Front And Focus In Foreign Metadata Field

With the rapid growth of network information resources, traditional directory format describing the paper documents is not suitable for the electronic resources. Metadata, a new procedure to describe the electronic resources, was developed and then attracted more and more attention. The emergence of metadata played an important role in the access to network information, the use of digital library, and the performance improvement of search engine. The exploration of research front and focus of foreign metadata will provide significant guidance for further development of metadata in China.Research front is the new directions emerged during the research process, representing the new trends and developments. Research focus is the scientific issue or topic discussed by a set of papers with intrinsic links during a certain period of time. Research front and focus represent the developments and new trends in one field. Grasping the research front and focus will be helpful in capturing the latest research directions and focusing on the directions with high potential. Researchers in China are very concerned about the research focus in metadata and have published many review articles. However, there is few papers concerning the systematically investigation of visualization on research front and focus in metadata. In this thesis, we employed the CiteSpace with the incorporation of literature search, citation analysis, and cluster analysis methods to explore the research front and focus in international metadata field.In chapter1, we will generally introduce the latest research progress in metadata research at home and abroad, visualization of information, and also the current situation of application of CiteSpace. First we will introduce the research progress of foreign metadata research, and also discuss the status of tracking international research focus in China, accomplices by the study of metadata in Chinese. For the foreign information visualization, we describe the construction of database, principle, tools, and advances in applied research of information visualization. The study of information visualization in China is mainly focused on the tracking study, and also obtains some achievements. Finally, we will discuss the application of CiteSpace.In chapter2, we will introduce the related theories, methods, and the data sources. The main theories include citation analysis theory and information visualization theory. The former is mainly concerned about the co-citation analysis theory, while the latter introduces the realization theory of CiteSpace and the three main functions of this software. Research methods consist of literature search, citation analysis, and cluster analysis. At last, we will provide the sources of data used in the following work.In chapter3, we provide detailed visualization study about the research front in metadata field. We plot the co-citation network map of literatures in metadata research field. Based on this map, we can clearly provide the research front of metadata study, and analyze the time evolution of research front. Finally, through carefully discussing about the influence of citation and network papers on the key nodes, we can confirm these research fronts and their evolution behaviors.In chapter4, we provide visualization investigation about the research focus in foreign metadata study. We plot the co-citation network map of literatures and key words. Then we perform second search of citing articles of high cited literatures, and provide co-citation network map analysis of these citing articles. Based on these high-frequency keywords and high cited articles in metadata fields, we can provide the main research focus in metadata field. The last section summarizes the research focus of metadata study in China and compare with that in foreign, and provide suggestions for the developments of metadata in China.