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.
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The
flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of
communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New
publications modify the existing networks by changing the distributions of
attributes and relations in document sets, while the networks are
self-referentially updated along trajectories. Codification operates
reflexively: the network structures are reconstructed from the perspective of
hindsight.