@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0490, 

TITLE={Research in Science of Sciences in Mainland China: 40 years of evolution}, 
  
AUTHOR={Jean-Charles Lamirel, Pascal Cuxac, }, 
	
JOURNAL={Open Journal in Information Systems Engineering}, 
	
VOLUME={1}, 

NUMBER={Issue 1}, 
	
YEAR={2020}, 

URL={https://www.openscience.fr/Research-in-Science-of-Sciences-in-Mainland-China-40-years-of-evolution}, 
	
DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0490}, 
	
ISSN={2634-1468}, 
	
ABSTRACT={In a first part of this paper, we highlight the historical context of Science of Science both in China and at a world level. In a second part, based on the unsupervised combination of GNG (neural gas) clustering with feature maximization metrics and associated contrast graphs, we perform an analysis of the contents of selected academic journal papers in Science of Science in China and the construction of an overall map of the research topic structure during the last 40 years. Furthermore, we highlight the topic evolution by the exploitation of the publication dates and make additional use of the author’s information for the sake of clarifying topics content. The obtained results, validated by domain experts, interestingly show that the Chinese Science of Science has gradually become mature in the last 40 years, turning from the general nature of the discipline to the relative disciplines and their potential interactions, from the qualitative analysis to the quantitative and visual analysis, and from the general research on social function of science to more specific economic function and strategic function studies. Consequently, the proposed novel method permits without supervision, without parameters and without help of any external knowledge to have very clear and very precise insights of the development of a scientific domain.}}