Citation-based clustering of publications using CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer

Abstract

Clustering scientific publications in an important problem in bibliometric research. We demonstrate how two software tools, CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer, can be used to cluster publications and to analyze the resulting clustering solutions. CitNetExplorer is used to cluster a large set of publications in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. The publications are clustered based on direct citation relations. CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer are used together to analyze the resulting clustering solutions. Both tools use visualizations to support the analysis of the clustering solutions, with CitNetExplorer focusing on the analysis at the level of individual publications and VOSviewer focusing on the analysis at an aggregate level. The demonstration provided in this paper shows how a clustering of publications can be created and analyzed using freely available software tools. Using the approach presented in this paper, bibliometricians are able to carry out sophisticated cluster analyses without the need to have a deep knowledge of clustering techniques and without requiring advanced computer skills.

Same data—different results? Towards a comparative approach to the identification of thematic structures in science

“…Velden applied the Infomap algorithm (as described by Velden et al 2017b) to the 2010 network of papers and their cited sources and provided the results for use by Havemann et al (2017). Havemann et al (2017) applied their algorithm to the 2003-2010 direct citation network that was used by Velden et al (2017b) and Van Eck and Waltman (2017). Wang and Koopman (2017) additionally used the Louvain algorithm with their data model.…”

“…We need to discuss this more explicitly. Several contributions to this special issue identified problems that might require a more explicit definition of the concept, be it because the minimum size of a structure that can represent a topic needs to be determined (Havemann et al 2017;Van Eck and Waltman 2017;Velden et al 2017b) or because topics look differently if the environment of the paper set is included (Boyack 2017a). Furthermore, all approaches reported in this special issue require decisions that have consequences for the number of topics constructed.…”

“…Van Eck and Waltman (2017) use CitNetExplorer, a recently developed tool that is also available online, for clustering the direct citation network and exploring the solution. The clustering is produced by their smart local moving algorithm, which is an improvement of the Louvain algorithm.…”

Big data analytics in health: an overview and bibliometric study of research activity

“…• Zhang, Yin from the School of Information and Safety Engineering of Zhongnan University of Economics & Law, China, who is the first author in two out of five papers. In an attempt to get a broader picture of influential authors in other fields related to health analytics, we performed a co-citation analysis of authors, using the VosViewer visualisation software (Van Eck & Waltman, 2017). We identified 21 437 unique authors in the 26 988 references of the 804 papers of our dataset.…”

Mapping hotspots and emerging trends of business model innovation under networking in Internet of Things

“…In addition, VOSviewer owns text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize bibliometric networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature presented in various different ways. Through its co-occurrence keyword map, research hotspots and trends in a certain field can be more clearly showed [29,30].…”