A study of the disciplinary structure of mechanics based on the titles of published journal articles in mechanics

摘要

Scientometrics is an emerging academic field for the exploration of the structure of science through journal citation relations.However,this article aims to study those subject-relevant journals' contents rather than studying their citations contained therein with the purpose of discovering a given disciplinary structure of science such as mechanics in our case.Based on the title wordings of 68,075 articles published in 66 mechanics journals,and using such research tools as the word frequency analysis,multidimensional scaling analysis and factor analysis,this article analyzes similarity and distinctions of those journals' contents in the subject field of mechanics.We first convert complex internal relations of these mechanics journals into a small number amount of independent indicators.The group of selected mechanics journals is then classified by a cluster analysis.This article demonstrates that the relations of the research contents of mechanics can be shown in an intuitively recognizable map,and we can have them analyzed from a perspective by taking into account about how those major branches of mechanics,such as solid mechanics,fluid mechanics,rational mechanics (including mathematical methods in mechanics),sound and vibration mechanics,computational mechanics,are related to the main thematic tenet of our study.It is hoped that such an approach,buttressed with this new perspective and approach,will enrich our means to explore the disciplinary structure of science and technology in general and mechanics in specific.