In this project, I use 29,513 bibliographic records from Web of Science to map and analyze the emergence of a new subfield in ecology called “Network Ecology" that represented more than 5% of the ecological publications in 2012. Based on author listings, I characterize the structure of scientific collaboration in this field by using network analysis. Based on co-citation networks, I then map the topic structure of this field, thereby allowing us to understand the social and thematic landscapes of this new sub-discipline as it emerges over time.

Figure: Contour plot of co-citation network. Based on bibliographic records pooled across all years; edges above a 35% minimum similarity considered; network is limited to the largest component, representing 73% of the papers; regions labeled with the most common terms found in the clusters and font size corresponds to term frequency.