MAPPING CHANGE IN SCIENTIFIC SPECIALTIES - A SCIENTOMETRIC RECONSTRUCTION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE

Has an identifiable core of activities called AI been established, dur ing the AI-boom in the eighties? Is AI already in a ''paradigmatic'' p hase? There has been a lot of disagreement among commentators and spec ialists about the nature of Artificial Intelligence as a specialty, Th is makes AI an interesting case of an emerging specialty, We use aggre gated journal-journal citations for describing Artificial Intelligence as sets of journals; factor analytic techniques are used to analyze t he development of AI in terms of (an emerging) stability and coherency of the journal-sets during the period 1982-1992, The analysis teaches us that AI has emerged as a set of journals with the characteristics of a discipline only since 1988, The thereafter relatively stable set of journals includes both fundamental and applied AI-journals, and jou rnals with a focus on expert systems, Additionally, specialties relate d to artificial intelligence (like pattern analysis, computer science, cognitive psychology) are identified, Neural network research is a pa rt neither of AI nor of its direct citation environment, Information s cience is related to AI only in the early eighties, The citation envir onment of AI is more stable than AI itself.