Toward a new way of mapping scientific fields: Authors' competence for publishing in scholarly journals

The objective of this article is to introduce a socially oriented approach to the analysis and representation of the social and intellectual structure of scientific fields. A sociological perspective is introduced as the theoretical basis to analyze scientific fields, and the social network framework is adopted to develop a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the organization of science. This approach is then applied to study the Spanish Library and Information Science community from 1999 to 2007. The underlying notion is that science is organized work, in which the pursuit of impact shapes the specific scientific organization. This generates mutual dependence and control among researchers, which may restrict access when formally communicating with other scientific communities. On the other hand, scholarly journals facilitate the coordination of new knowledge and serve as platforms for interaction among scientists. Consequently, the interaction of well‐defined groups of homogenous researchers, concentrated around particular sets of journals, leads to the formation of cohesive (sub)groups tied together by the degree of similarity of the researchers' competence. An empirical test suggests that this consideration can accurately reveal a segment of the structure of the scientific field. This study therefore introduces a new approach for mapping the structure of scientific fields that differs from most existing methods, which are based on (co)citation.