Forecasting Research On The Direction Of Preponderant Disciplines In Research-oriented Universities Based On Social Network

Disciplines are the foundation for universities to cultivate talents, make scientific researches and serve the society. So the formulation of discipline development strategy is of great significance to the development of university. Then if we can use quantitative research methods to analyze a university’s overall disciplines layout, identify its preponderant disciplines, critical disciplines and possible interdisciplinary directions empirically? When determining the development direction of a certain discipline, can we quantitatively analyze the university’s research status and international trends in this field? All these questions need to be concerned in the practical and theoretical study of discipline development strategy, but relevant study is deficient currently.For these issues, this paper carries out forecasting research on the development of preponderant disciplines in research-oriented universities based on patent data. We select Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University as cases, use patent map and social network methods to make visualized analysis of these universities’ patent data, thus understanding their disciplines distribution, identifying their preponderant disciplines, critical disciplines and possible interdisciplinary directions respectively. The conclusion of comparative analysis of these three universities can provide scientific basis for their formulation of overall discipline development strategy. Then we take one preponderant discipline for example, combine patent map and social network methods to analyze and compare these universities’ research status and international trends in this field, thus making a prediction for each university about the development direction of this discipline. Finally we construct a technical model for universities’discipline advantages and development forcasting based on patent data. Based on these, this study puts forward relative suggestions, such as formulate discipline development strategy more scientifically, further optimize disciplines layout, allocate academic resources reasonably and so on.