Abstract: As a scientific field, scientific mapping offers a set of standardized methods and tools which can be consistently adopted by researchers in different knowledge domains to answer their own research questions. This study examined the scientific articles that applied science mapping tools (SMT) to analyze scientific domains and the citations of these application articles. To understand the roles of these application articles in scholarly communication, we analyzed 496 application articles and their citations from 14 SMT by classifying them into library and information science (LIS) and other fields (non-LIS) in terms of both publication venues and analyzed domains. In our study, we found that science mapping, a topic that is deeply situated in the LIS field, has gained increasing attention from various non-LIS scientific fields over the last few years, especially since 2012. Science mapping application studies practically grew up in LIS domain and spread to other fields. The application articles within and outside of the LIS fields played different roles in advancing the application of science mapping and knowledge discovery. Especially, we have discovered the important role of articles, which studied non-LIS domains but published in LIS journals, in advancing the application of SMTs.

Keywords: science mapping tools, scholarly communication, scientific software, scientific evolution