Analysis of Progress in Research on Community Mining Based on Bibliometrics

In recent years, with the rapid development of science and technology, network science research has entered a new stage. Community mining, as an important aspect of network science research, is playing an increasingly important role. It is of great significance for beginners, relevant researchers, and even policy makers to grasp the whole context of community mining and keep up with the latest developments. Based on Web of Science data, this paper first presents the community mining field as a whole by means of bibliometrics, from the perspectives of time distribution, geographical distribution, and discipline distribution. Then, seven indexes for the published scientific papers are selected from the four aspects of quantity, quality, timeliness, and balance to explore the core research institutions and core authors in the field of community mining. The results show that the core research institutions are Indiana University, the University of New South Wales, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc., and the core authors are Olaf Sporns, Santo Fortunato, Santo Fortunato, and so on. Finally, based on the word frequency analysis and topic clustering, this study conducted a topic analysis in the community mining field. The main research topics in this field are applications in the fields of biology and social networks, and research on the theories and methods, along with their application in emerging fields. The analysis results could be used as significant references for further research in the field of community mining.