| The present research aims to study the developmental trend of a knowledge domain.Understanding and grasping the principles of scientific knowledge evolution plays a significant role in promoting the development of science and technology.In the past,identifying and tracking the development and evolution of a certain knowledge domain was the main research topic of bibliometrics.And citation analysis is the main method adopted.However,the controversy accompanying citation analysis never stops in its developmental process.The main criticism is that citation analysis only cares about citation counts,but ignores the emotions and attitudes of the authors.It may lead to the results being too macro and prone to deviation due to the influence of unstandardized citations.In this case,this research aims to propose a new method based on citation content and citation function analysis.To verify the feasibility of this approach,a mass extinction corpus and a psycholinguistics(verbal behavior theory)corpus are established to do case studies.The well-known representative papers,Alvarez(1980)and Skinner(1957),in these two knowledge domains,are selected as the retrieval points to download papers from 1980 to 2015 and from 1958 to 2019.The citation contexts are extracted from the academic papers of their own knowledge domains.And then,key terms are generated by Ter Mine and the citation functions of mass extinction corpus are annotated manually.This research explores the knowledge evolution of mass extinction through key terms analysis and citation function analysis.Afterwards,the typical lexical syntactic patterns of citation function are summarized through the annotated results of mass extinction.This research uses part of the typical lexical syntactic patterns to do automatic annotation,and based on the annotated results to do a tentative analysis on exploring the knowledge evolution in psycholinguistics(verbal behavior theory).The findings indicate that,in mass extinction,the research community’s research topics and citations on Alvarez’s hypothesis experience the process of neutral citation,criticism,viewpoint competition and finally acceptance.And the tentative analysis shows the verbal behavior of Skinner experiencing the process of comparison,competition,criticism and compatibility.The results of mass extinction claim the feasibility of knowledge evolution analysis through citation functions,and the tentative analysis proves the possibility of automatic annotation.The new methods proposed in this research can provide new ideas and methods for scientific researchers and research managers to accurately grasp the veining and trend of scientific development. |
