Linking social network analysis with the analytic hierarchy process for visualizing knowledge domains in assessing academic performance – the case of Taiwan’s Intelligent Transportation Systems

This paper introduces empirical studies of visualizing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) knowledge maps and assessing academic achievements. Social network analysis is applied to visualize ITS knowledge maps to quantify the strength of the connections among individuals or universities. The results from empirical study show that development of ITS research is very promising worldwide. CiteSpace and UCINET are proven to be good tools for demonstrating ITS knowledge maps with clusters by subjects, institutions and authors. The Taiwan’s ITS knowledge maps with clusters can be summarized to assess their academic achievements by using AHP analysis. The ranking indicators and corresponding knowledge maps provide an overview of current performance status of ITS researchers in different ITS user services in Taiwan. This can eventually identify the most important ITS user service in local areas, and contribute to highlight hot issues of ITS researches in the future.