Journal Co-Citation Analysis for Identifying Trends of Inter-Disciplinary Research: An Exploratory Case Study in a University

A journal stands as a marker of the intellectual space which holds vast areas of literature. Exploring and analysing the underlined knowledge sources and themes of the journal literature will significantly benefit any institution to identify the key intellectual domain strength and improve in research collaboration. The main objective of this paper is to identify inter-disciplinary trends of research for one university as a case study, using journal co-citation analysis. With the help of correlation metric and cluster analysis, the published literature between 2004 and 2013 from seven subject domains (i.e. including medicine, pharmacy and pharmacology, biological sciences, linguistics, modern languages, chemistry, and computer science and information systems) are analysed and interpreted. The results can demonstrate that there are the strong research dominance in the medical field and the prospective collaboration in social science and chemistry. In addition, the interpretation of the findings could be served as a foundation for future research in the direction of strong bonding between inter-disciplinary fields.