The analysis of scientific disciplines and their development using a Social Network Analysis Tool

Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Information Management, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne (Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik, insb. Informationsmanagement), language: English, abstract: Journal databases provide an easy access to most scientifically relevant topics and articles. Since articles refer to other articles these, do provide a social network-like structure. Social networks follow certain patterns that contain relevant data about the current state or the development in the future. With these indications, we will try to use a social network Analysis tool in order to find such patterns within the field of sciences extracted from a scientific database. The tool we will be using is called TecFlow. The database is a partial extraction from ISIWeb. Within this paper, two hypotheses are analysed and described. The focus lies on the centrality and importance of the concept of RFID over time. Due to the actual relevance of social network analysis and new character of this paper, the analysis-results can lead to various future researches and studies, which are identified and described within this article.