  When using scientific literature to model scholarly discourse, a research
specialty can be operationalized as an evolving set of related documents. Each
publication can be expected to contribute to the further development of the
specialty at the research front. The specific combinations of title words and
cited references in a paper can then be considered as a signature of the
knowledge claim in the paper: new words and combinations of words can be
expected to represent variation, while each paper is at the same time
selectively positioned into the intellectual organization of a field using
context-relevant references. Can the mutual information among these three
dimensions--title words, cited references, and sequence numbers--be used as an
indicator of the extent to which intellectual organization structures the
uncertainty prevailing at a research front? The effect of the discovery of
nanotubes (1991) on the previously existing field of fullerenes is used as a
test case. Thereafter, this method is applied to science studies with a focus
on scientometrics using various sample delineations. An emerging research front
about citation analysis can be indicated.
