Analysis of scientific fields using journal citation networks: An empirical study

Since the very first occurrence, science was considered to be the most important aspect of human lives. With the growth of science and its fields the quality of live have grown as well. Over time science divided into two major categories: sciences that were focused to more practically help humanity - applied sciences, and those that helped development of other sciences and themselves in a theoretical manner - fundamental sciences. We give the answer to which scientific fields are the most favored today and whether they are a part of applied or theoretical sciences by analyzing citation network of journals from one part of the Web of Science database. We introduce a measure called the probability of field superiority for ranking scientific fields based on journal citation networks. The probability of field superiority of field A over field B indicates that the randomly selected journal from field A has a bigger PageRank value than randomly selected journal from field B. The probability of field superiority was calculated for each category in Web of Science. Ranking of scientific fields shows which science branches are more favored today, which of them tend to be more perspective and where investments go. Journal rankings obtained from the network show that multidisciplinary journals tend to have the highest rankings. By using breadth first search algorithm and Tarjan's algorithm it was shown that graph has a bow-tie structure that most of real-world directed networks tend to have. Walktrap algorithm detected 21 communities with pronounced community structure. Communities conduct mostly of multidisciplinary journals with mathematics as one of the fundamental sciences with the highest number of journals in each community.