| The rapid development of science and technology has led to an increasingly complex system of disciplines. Discipline system nowadays shows the trend of splitting and crossing at the same time. Wherein interdisciplines attract researchers from different disciplines to communicate and integrate knowledge, which have produced a series of influential scientific research. Research into interdisciplinary collaboration pattern can deepen our understanding of the rule of collaborative research on one hand and provide theoretical help in creating a better scientific collaboration environment and promoting cross-disciplinary communication which results in higher scientific output on the other hand. In this case, the scientific coauthorship network has received attention from a number of disciplines. Currently, research in this area mainly focuses on the static characteristics or the evolution of coauthorship network under a particular subject. However, the study on the intrinsic relationship between research topics and the evolution of coauthorship network reveals insufficient.Therefore, this thesis takes the interdisciplinary field "Evolution of Cooperation" as an example, and collected 2467 related literature bibliographic data between 1961 and 2013 from the Web of Science. The main content of this paper is divided into following three parts.(1) The topic structure of this field is detected from the community division of the citation networks under different time slices, and the citation strength is regarded as an index of the similarity between communities from adjacent periods. The results imply that the topics are discipline-oriented. Researchers from different disciplines may introduce their knowledge and experiment methods in solving the interdisciplinary problems. Interdiscipline fields are not evolving in a relatively closed knowledge space, but rather under the influence of theoretical development of other related disciplines.(2) Scientific coauthorship network of this field is constructed. The network structure shows that a multi-topic, high modularity and high research output capacity network core is gradually formed during the process. The evolution of this core experienced three stages, a small cluster stage, a rapid consolidation stage, and a stable growth stage. The structure of this core has an advantage in knowledge creation capacity over those surrounding clusters as a whole.(3) Topic analysis and the evolution of coauthorship network are combined in this part. We construct a topic-coauthorship networks in which the researcher's interest in certain topic can be intuitively observed. The network visualization results show that the core network researchers are grouped together according to the research topics. The muti-topic researchers are playing an important role in linking the clusters and communities under different topics. Finally, we provide an inclusive evaluation of the overall pattern of scientific collaboration of the interdisciplinary field.The major contribution of this thesis can be summarized as the following two points: Firstly, we innovatively make a combination of citation network and the coauthorship network, and proposed a method that is able to analysis the evolution of the topics and the coauthorship network simultaneously. It provides a useful analysis tool to further understand the internal dynamic mechanism governs the scientific collaboration evolution. Secondly, this paper makes a comprehensive data analysis on topics and coauthorship network of the interdisciplinary field "Evolution of Cooperation". The pattern of this field has a heuristic value in understanding the dynamic co-evolution mechanism between interdisciplinary topics and coauthorship networks of other general interdisciplines. |
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