Data stemmed title terms from Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research

Dominance hierarchies have been studied for almost 100 years. The science of science approach used here provides high-level insight into how the dynamics of dominance hierarchy research have shifted over this long timescale. To summarize these patterns, I extracted publication metadata using a Google Scholar search for the phrase ‘dominance hierarchy’, resulting in over 26 000 publications. I used text mining approaches to assess patterns in three areas: (1) general patterns in publication frequency and rate, (2) dynamics of term usage and (3) term co-occurrence in publications across the history of the field. While the overall number of publications per decade continues to rise, the percent growth rate has fallen in recent years, demonstrating that although there is sustained interest in dominance hierarchies, the field is no longer experiencing the explosive growth it showed in earlier decades. Results from title term co-occurrence networks and community structure show that the different subfields of dominance hierarchy research were most strongly separated early in the field’s history while modern research shows more evidence for cohesion and a lack of distinct term community boundaries. These methods provide a general view of the history of research on dominance hierarchies and can be applied to other fields or search terms to gain broad synthetic insight into patterns of interest, especially in fields with large bodies of literature.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.优势等级（dominance hierarchies）的相关研究已开展近百年。本文所采用的科学学（science of science）研究范式，可从宏观层面揭示该领域研究动态在这一漫长时间尺度内的演变规律。为总结这些研究模式，笔者以谷歌学术（Google Scholar）为检索工具，以‘dominance hierarchy’为检索短语进行文献检索，共获取超过26000篇出版物的元数据。随后，笔者通过文本挖掘（text mining）方法，从三个维度剖析相关研究的发展特征：(1) 出版物数量与发表速率的整体趋势；(2) 术语使用的动态变化；(3) 该领域发展历程中，出版物内术语的共现关联模式。尽管每十年的出版物总量仍在持续增长，但近年的百分比增长率已出现下滑，这表明尽管学界对优势等级研究的兴趣始终不减，但该领域已不再像数十年前那样呈现爆发式增长态势。标题术语共现（term co-occurrence）网络与社区结构（community structure）的分析结果显示，优势等级研究的不同子领域在该领域发展早期的边界最为清晰，而现代研究则更凸显出研究内容的融合性，且已不存在明确的术语社群边界。上述方法可为优势等级研究的发展历程提供全景式视角，且可推广至其他研究领域或检索关键词，以帮助研究者对特定研究主题的发展模式获得综合性的宏观洞察，尤其适用于拥有海量文献的研究领域。本文属于主题特刊《啄食顺序（pecking order）百年纪念：优势等级研究的现状与未来展望》（The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies）的组成部分。