Abstract

In the context of open science, data sharing and reuse are becoming important researchers’ activities. Among the discussions about data sharing and reuse, data journals and data papers shows visible results. Data journals are published in many academic fields, and the number of papers is increasing. Unlike the data itself, data papers contain activities that cite and receive citations, thus creating their own intellectual structures. This study analyzed 14 data journals indexed by Web of Science, 6,086 data papers and 84,908 cited references to examine the intellectual structure of data journals and data papers in academic community. Along with the author’s details, the co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis were visualized in network to identify the detailed subject areas. The results of the analysis show that the frequent authors, affiliated institutions, and countries are different from that of traditional journal papers. These results can be interpreted as mainly because the authors who can easily produce data publish data papers. In both co-citation and bibliographic analysis, analytical tools, databases, and genome composition were the main subtopic areas. The co-citation analysis resulted in nine clusters, with specific subject areas being water quality and climate. The bibliographic analysis consisted of a total of 27 components, and detailed subject areas such as ocean and atmosphere were identified in addition to water quality and climate. Notably, the subject areas of the social sciences have also emerged.