Scientometric analysis of research advancement in graph theory and its applications

Graph theory is a branch of mathematics and becoming progressively more important research area owing to its usefulness in diverse research fields. Usually, graph theory is used to model some empirical situation or binary relationship among various entities. This study aims to reveal the global research trends and the contribution from various countries, research institutes, scientific journals as well as areas of research through scientometric analysis. Alongside, this study aims to identify the research fronts of graph theory during successive periods by analyzing the research areas and research topics. About 20,260 publications in the graph theory research within a time span of 1986–2015 were retrieved and analyzed from Web of Science. This study revealed the most important and newly emerged research areas. Evolving trend of the research fronts in this field was visualized by drawing the keyword co-occurrence maps during successive periods.