Indicators of structural change in the dynamics of science: Entropy statistics of the SCI Journal Citation Reports

Abstract

Can change in citation patterns among journals be used as an indicator of structural change in the organization of the sciences? Aggregated journal-journal citations for 1999 are compared with similar data in the Journal Citation Reports 1998 of the Science Citation Index. In addition to indicating local change, probabilistic entropy measures enable us to analyze changes in distributions at different levels of aggregation. The results of various statistics are discussed and compared by elaborating the journal-journal mappings. The relevance of this indicator for science and technology policies is further specified.