Citation Network Analysis and state of the art summary on Strategic Environmental Assessment

Citation network analysis (CNA) started with Garfield’s book published in 1964 (Garfield et al., 1964) and has been used to answer questions like “how scientists interact with each other” (Jin et al., 2011). In particular, network analysis is adopted to reconstruct and understand scientific literature through forms and methods of systemic investigation (Calero-Medina and Noyons, 2008; Ding, 2011; Almind and Ingwersen, 1997; Coulon, 2005), namely by conceiving the social system of scientists’ collaboration as a network. In addition, community detection tools may facilitate the orderly reconstruction of state of the art summaries, when the subject of the survey becomes very complex (Fortunato, 2010)