Purpose: Based on the weak tie theory, this paper proposes a series of connection indicatorsof weak tie subnets and weak tie nodes to detect research topics, recognize their connections,and understand their evolution.Design/methodology/approach: First, keywords are extracted from article titles and pre-processed. Second, high-frequency keywords are selected to generate weak tie co-occurrencenetworks. By removing the internal lines of clustered sub-topic networks, we focus on theanalysis of weak tie subnets' composition and functions and the weak tie nodes' roles.