From the United States to China:The Transfer of Research Centres in Information Science

This study not only analyses the centres of research in Information Science (IS), including the migration of central topics and central countries, but also analyses the relationship between the shifting of centres of research and their transformation. In addition, this study explores the relationship between the formation of the centre of research and the academic influence of the country on IS itself. We collected 25,150 articles, including 313,293 references about citation analysis, from databases SCI-E and SSCI between 1977 and 2016 as our data source. The following findings were obtained through this study: the transfer (transfer time) of central research topics in the IS domain has accelerated, from 12 to 8 years between 1980 and 1990, to 6 to 4 years between 2000 and 2010, and to 3 years between 2011 and 2016. The number of central research topics has also grown, from one between 1997 and 2006, to two from 2006 to 2013 to three from 2013 to 2016. The geographical centres of IS research were the US and Britain between the 1970s and 1980s, but gradually migrated through neighbouring countries, and finally to Asia by 2000. China, which became the centre of research for IS in 2005 for the first time, has been ranked first since 2011. In addition, countries acting as centres of research enjoy not only a high output of literature but also great academic influence. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.