Mapping Institutions and Their Weak Ties in a Research Specialty: A Case Study of Cystic Fibrosis Body Composition Research

Using a collection of papers gathered from the Web of Science on the topic of cystic fibrosis body composition research, we demonstrate analysis and visualization methods that show the collaboration structure of institutions in the specialty and the researchers that function as weak ties among them. Institution names were extracted from the collection of papers and disambiguated using the Derwent Analytics (v1.2) software product. Institutions were clustered into collaboration groups based on their co-occurrence in papers. A crossmap of clustered institutions against research fronts, which were derived using bibliographic coupling analysis, shows the research fronts that specific institutions participate in, their collaborator institutions and the research fronts in which those collaborations occurred. A crossmap of institutions to author teams, derived from co-authorship analysis, reveals research teams in the specialty and their general institutional affiliation, and further identifies the researchers that function as weak ties and the institutions that they link. This case study reveals that the techniques introduced in this paper can be used to extract a large amount of useful information about institutions participating in a research specialty.