Visual Analysis Of The Evolution And Frontiers Of Project Management

During the past half century, theories and methods of the project management practices in many fields, the Project Management Discipline from formation to maturity has built a relatively complete body of knowledge systems. By using the method of information visualization draw the scientific knowledge map, researched the evolution and frontiers of the based theory of the Project Management Discipline. It can sort out the historical context of discipline development effectively, understand the evolution of discipline. It is also significant to study and apply to the theories and methods of the project management.The data of this thesis are from literatures about project management which are indexed by Web of Science database (from1962to2013) and CNKI database (from1981to2013). This thesis can explore the rule of development comprehensive and directly by literature tracking back which is based on scientometrics, social network analysis and information visualization technology. Firstly, used the data from Web of Science database which is from1962to1989to draw co-citation network mapping the knowledge and used social network analysis to dissect the basic theory and the structure of knowledge of the Project Management. By analysed document clustering to show the evolution of the basic theory. This thesis established the basic knowledge of the Project Management Discipline which is constituted by the Management Discipline contents, Computer Science Discipline contents, PERT/CPM, R&D project, conflict management as the representative of organization theories, and divided the Project Management Discipline into three phases:forming stage, developing stage and mature stage. Then dumped, cleaned and divided the keywords of the data which is from Web of Science and CNKI database from1990to2013. Used SQL script to build the keyword co-occurrence relations and input the relational data tables to Gephi to draw the co-word map of six time zones per four years. I accomplished mapping division by the modularity algorithm; ranked the node size by degree; analysed by betweenness centrality and word frequency, tracked the dynamics hot topics of the Project Management Discipline and explored the frontier formation process, summarized five research frontiers of the Project Management in mature phase:Risk Management, Software Project Management, Knowledge Management, Scheduling and the Construction Management. The characteristic of the Chinese Project Management is founded by analysis the hot topic of Chinese from CNKI database and Web of Science database. Finally, through extracting the ego-centered networks from the panoramic co-word knowledge map to finish the comparative analysis of international and Chinese researcher’s hot topics, summarized the differences between Chinese researchers’ studies and international studies, concluded Chinese researchers’ contribution to the international research of the project management.This thesis used the method of information visualization, through analysis scientific knowledge map of the discipline completed the research of the evolution and frontiers of the Project Management, put forward a proposal for developing the Chinese Project Management Discipline, the method and conclusion of this research can be a reference for the professional of project management researchers and students.