The influence of authors is mostly based on their capacity to form specific self-contained and/or active research communities or topics while also inspiring fruitful spin-off research derived from those communities or topics. Accurately estimating author influence and its indirect effect in inspiring external research creativity must thus be based on very precise community roles as well as topic-role analysis on citing material. In this paper we thus implement, compare, and combine two different kinds of knowledge mapping approaches used to track authors’ influence over time—a recent topic-based mapping approach and an original hybrid community-based mapping approach. The experimental context of our study is the analysis of the dynamics and of the influence of the research of Prof. Liu Zeyuan, the most important contributor in the field of Science of Science in China. This analysis focuses on papers citing Professor Liu Zeyuan's research and highlights the full extent of his creative thinking.