Making a visual research landscape of surface water and groundwater interactions (1980 - 2017) using free online tools

Abstract

This abstract is submitted to the 2018 IAH annual meeting (9-14 Sept 2018, Daejon Korea) . Literature search is the most important thing in research idea formulation. The most applied practice would be, (1) accessing scientific database, (2) downloading papers, (3) reading, and (4) extracting important information from each paper, prior to (5) writing a review. However, most of us don’t have the big picture of the constellation of the literature. This project will give the readers example on how to make a visual literature landscape using available free online tools (VosViewer). We insert additional step (2a) downloading metadata and setup a bibliographic library, (2b) importing metadata to VosViewer, and (2c) making visualisation. The workflow was applied to our attempt to understand the landscape of surface water-groundwater interactions.Surface water is closely linked to unconfined groundwater, especially in Indonesia. To put Indonesia's research on surface water and groundwater interactions in to perspective, we did a scientometric study based on literature search using VosViewer and Scopus database. We analyzed a corpus of 281 papers to extract the hidden pattern of information using text mining algorithm. There are 5 clusters of subtopic that we gained from the dataset: modeling/simulation, contamination, water balance, and climate-land use. We also find multiple gaps in the literature that mostly related to local geological settings. Based on that, we endorse Indonesia authors to start looking at the unique socio-economic and biogeophysical features, and report it in form of scientific papers/reports and disseminate their key points online to get more international attention. Based on the results, we also push Indonesia’s scientific community to lead more international collaboration to promote local distinctive features using widespread collaboration tools online. Given the lack of funding, we also promote the usage of free and open source tools for any kinds of research initiatives.Keywords: literature review, text mining, free tools, surface water - groundwater interactions