  The understanding of how science works can contribute to making scientific
development more effective. In this paper, we report an analysis of the
organization and interconnection between two important issues in chemistry,
namely mass spectrometry (MS) and capillary electrophoresis (CE). For that
purpose, we employed science of science techniques based on complex networks.
More specifically, we considered a citation network in which the nodes and
connections represent papers and citations, respectively. Interesting results
were found, including a good separation between some clusters of articles
devoted to instrumentation techniques and applications. However, the papers
that describe CE-MS did not lead to a well-defined cluster. In order to better
understand the organization of the citation network, we considered a
multi-scale analysis, in which we used the information regarding sub-clusters.
Firstly, we analyzed the sub-cluster of the first article devoted to the
coupling between CE and MS, which was found to be a good representation of its
sub-cluster. The second analysis was about the sub-cluster of a seminal paper
known to be the first that dealt with proteins by using CE-MS. By considering
the proposed methodologies, our paper paves the way for researchers working
with both techniques, since it elucidates the knowledge organization and can
therefore lead to better literature reviews.
