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’.

支配等级（dominance hierarchy）的相关研究迄今已有近百年历史。本研究采用的科学学（science of science）研究范式，为剖析近百年来支配等级研究领域的动态演变提供了宏观视角。为总结该领域的研究演变规律，本研究以“支配等级”为检索词在谷歌学术（Google Scholar）中抓取文献元数据，最终获取超2.6万篇学术文献。本研究采用文本挖掘（text mining）方法，从三个维度解析领域发展特征：其一为文献发表频次与增速的整体规律；其二为术语使用的动态变化；其三为领域发展历程中文献的术语共现特征。尽管每十年的文献总发文量仍持续增长，但近年的百分比增速已有所回落，这表明尽管学界对支配等级的研究热情持续不减，但该领域已不再具备数十年前的爆发式增长态势。标题术语共现网络与社区结构分析结果显示，支配等级研究的不同子领域在该领域发展早期边界最为清晰，而现代研究则呈现出更强的融合性，不再存在明确的术语社区边界。本研究方法可为支配等级研究的发展历程提供全景式洞察，同时也可推广至其他研究领域或检索词，以实现对目标研究范式的综合性宏观分析，尤其适用于拥有海量文献的研究领域。本文属于专题合集《啄序百年：支配等级研究的现状与未来展望》的收录文章。