The evolution of automatic control field networks during the half century

In modern research the innovation is easy to appear in the multidisciplinary investigation. Understanding the interaction among related scientific research fields is an important problem. In this paper, we analyze the paper data published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC) during the past half century, and construct a field network to disclose the evolution of research fields in IEEE Control Systems Society. We find that the distribution of number of papers per field is heterogeneous with a power-law form, and there are some hot fields that can attract more papers in some time period. Hence, the field network owns the scale-free character and these key fields tend to interconnect as a dense core. Moreover, many structural properties in the field network, such as degree distribution, clustering coefficient, average shortest path length, degree mixing pattern, are evolving stably, which may provide some clues to predict the future development in Control Systems Society.