This project aims to analyze the process and expression of internal knowledge production through the social and knowledge networks of modern Chinese psychologists, in order to further understand how psychological knowledge was able to have force and influence in modern China. The main historical materials of this project are the Dictionary of Republican Figures and the Dictionary of Psychological Figures, as well as several psychological journals.

Through text mining, a list of actors engaged in psychological research can be extracted. This list can be combined with the Dictionary of Figures to further extract the core information needed for this project, including name, date of birth, origin, school graduated from, department, and work unit. Based on this, a social network of psychological research activities will be established, and the composition characteristics and grouping methods of the academic community will be explored. The impact factors encountered by knowledge circulation and production will be observed from the aggregation and dispersion of people in the social network.

In addition, after digitizing the data of several psychological journals, topic modeling will be used extensively analyze the articles written by psychological research actors. This approach will be used to find the hidden rules and structures in the text, classify them into several topics and the word groups that make up the topics, in order to analyze the main topics and vocabulary used in psychological research. Through social networks and topic models, it can be clearly seen that the formation and change of knowledge is a complex historical process, including the combination of various sources and perspectives.