IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wus009/1226.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is regional science a scientific discipline? Answers from a citation based Social Network Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Maier, Gunther
  • Kaufmann, Alexander
  • Vyborny, Michael

Abstract

From its very beginnings, regional science has been open to intellectual exchange with many other scientific disciplines. This has led to cross-fertilization, but also to problems concerning the intellectual identity of regional science. After half a century of history of the field, it is time to ask the question, whether or not regional science has developed into a scientific discipline in these decades. In this paper we use cross-citation data between 464 journals in different disciplines to answer this question. With this data set we attempt to find out, how strongly regional science journals are interconnected by citations as compared to their citation links to journals in neighbouring disciplines. We find that when we consider the raw citation data, regional science becomes fragmented with its journals tied to those from economics, geography, planning, etc. When we standardize the citation information to take into account size differences between journals, however, regional science appears to form a strong and well connected dscientific discipline.

Suggested Citation

  • Maier, Gunther & Kaufmann, Alexander & Vyborny, Michael, 2008. "Is regional science a scientific discipline? Answers from a citation based Social Network Analysis," SRE-Discussion Papers 2008/02, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wus009:1226
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.wu.ac.at/1226/
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John M. Quigley, 2001. "The renaissance in regional research," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 35(2), pages 167-178.
    2. Andrew M. Isserman, 1993. "Lost In Space? On The History, Status, And Future Of Regional Science (Presidential Address, April 4, 1992)," The Review of Regional Studies, Southern Regional Science Association, vol. 23(1), pages 1-50, Summer.
    3. Alexander I. Pudovkin & Eugene Garfield, 2002. "Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically related journals," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 53(13), pages 1113-1119, November.
    4. Allen, Marcus T. & Kau, James B., 1991. "Contributing authors and institutions to the Journal of Urban Economics: 1974-1989," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 373-384, November.
    5. Francis Narin & Mark Carpenter & Nancy C. Berlt, 1972. "Interrelationships of scientific journals," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 23(5), pages 323-331, September.
    6. Peter Nijkamp, 1994. "Regional Science — A Product Life Cycle Interpretation," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 73(4), pages 341-345, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Royuela, Vicente, 2012. "Regional Science trends through the analysis of the main facts of the 51st ERSA Conference," INVESTIGACIONES REGIONALES - Journal of REGIONAL RESEARCH, Asociación Española de Ciencia Regional, issue 24, pages 13-39.
    2. Julia Koschinsky & Sierdjan Koster & Roberto Patuelli & Vicente Royuela & Vassilis Tselios, 2014. "Editorial: REGION - the online open-access journal of ERSA," REGION, European Regional Science Association, vol. 1, pages 1-3.
    3. Hakyeon Lee, 2015. "Uncovering the multidisciplinary nature of technology management: journal citation network analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(1), pages 51-75, January.
    4. Guang Yu & Yi-Jun Li, 2010. "Identification of referencing and citation processes of scientific journals based on the citation distribution model," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 82(2), pages 249-261, February.
    5. C.M. Calero Medina & T.N. Leeuwen, 2012. "Seed journal citation network maps: A method based on network theory," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(6), pages 1226-1234, June.
    6. Wang, Qi & Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "Large-scale analysis of the accuracy of the journal classification systems of Web of Science and Scopus," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 347-364.
    7. David Plane, 2012. "What about aging in regional science?," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 48(2), pages 469-483, April.
    8. Loet Leydesdorff & Caroline S. Wagner & Lutz Bornmann, 2018. "Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(2), pages 567-592, February.
    9. Leydesdorff, Loet & Rafols, Ismael, 2012. "Interactive overlays: A new method for generating global journal maps from Web-of-Science data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 318-332.
    10. Roberta CAPELLO, 2012. "Regional economics: theoretical achievements and challenges," Timisoara Journal of Economics, West University of Timisoara, Romania, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, vol. 5(18), pages 313-335.
    11. Ye, Xinyue & Yue, Wenze, 2014. "Comparative analysis of regional development: Exploratory space-time data analysis and open source implementation," Economics Discussion Papers 2014-20, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    12. Florentin Gloetzl & Ernest Aigner, 2015. "Pluralism in the Market of Science? A citation network analysis of economic research at universities in Vienna," Ecological Economics Papers ieep5, Institute of Ecological Economics.
    13. Bárbara S. Lancho-Barrantes & Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote & Félix Moya-Anegón, 2010. "The iceberg hypothesis revisited," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 85(2), pages 443-461, November.
    14. Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez & J. A. García & J. Fdez-Valdivia, 2014. "Evolutionary games between subject categories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 869-888, October.
    15. Rey-Martí, Andrea & Ribeiro-Soriano, Domingo & Palacios-Marqués, Daniel, 2016. "A bibliometric analysis of social entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 69(5), pages 1651-1655.
    16. Zhenhua Chen & Laurie A. Schintler, 2023. "Rediscovering regional science: Positioning the field's evolving location in science and society," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(3), pages 617-642, June.
    17. Radu Munteanu & Marin Apetroae, 2007. "Journal relatedness: An actor-actor and actor-objectives case study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 73(2), pages 215-230, November.
    18. Dorta-González, P. & Dorta-González, M.I., 2013. "Impact maturity times and citation time windows: The 2-year maximum journal impact factor," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 593-602.
    19. Li, Yunrong & Radicchi, Filippo & Castellano, Claudio & Ruiz-Castillo, Javier, 2013. "Quantitative evaluation of alternative field normalization procedures," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 746-755.
    20. Roberto Camerani & Daniele Rotolo & Nicola Grassano, 2018. "Do Firms Publish? A Multi-Sectoral Analysis," SPRU Working Paper Series 2018-21, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Regionalforschung;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wiw:wus009:1226. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: WU Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://research.wu.ac.at/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.