Visualizing a field of research: A methodology of systematic scientometric reviews

Abstract

Systematic scientometric reviews, empowered by computational and visual analytic approaches, offer opportunities to improve the timeliness, accessibility, and reproducibility of studies of the literature of a field of research. On the other hand, effectively and adequately identifying the most representative body of scholarly publications as the basis of subsequent analyses remains a common bottleneck in the current practice. What can we do to reduce the risk of missing something potentially significant? How can we compare different search strategies in terms of the relevance and specificity of topical areas covered? In this study, we introduce a flexible and generic methodology based on a significant extension of the general conceptual framework of citation indexing for delineating the literature of a research field. The method, through cascading citation expansion, provides a practical connection between studies of science from local and global perspectives. We demonstrate an application of the methodology to the research of literature-based discovery (LBD) and compare five datasets constructed based on three use scenarios and corresponding retrieval strategies, namely a query-based lexical search (one dataset), forward expansions starting from a groundbreaking article of LBD (two datasets), and backward expansions starting from a recently published review article by a prominent expert in LBD (two datasets). We particularly discuss the relevance of areas captured by expansion processes with reference to the query-based scientometric visualization. The method used in this study for comparing bibliometric datasets is applicable to comparative studies of search strategies.

Measuring researchers’ potential scholarly impact with structural variations: Four types of researchers in information science (1979–2018)

“…CiteSpace is an information visualization software system suitable for multivariate, timesharing, and dynamic complex network analysis [11,17,72,86,87]; it takes a set of bibliographic records as its input and models the intellectual structure of the underlying domain in terms of a synthesized network based on a time series of networks derived from each year's publications. CiteSpace supports several types of bibliometrics studies, including collaboration network analysis, co-word analysis, ACA, document co-citation analysis, text and geospatial visualizations.…”

“…The impact of the introduction of new knowledge on the fundamental network structure of existing research fields is a crucial aspect of the development of scientific activities. A major form of creative work is to bridge previously disjoint bodies of knowledge [10][11][12][13]. Chen proposed a predictive analytic model-structural variation analysis (SVA) [14].…”

Identifying emerging trends in rheumatoid arthritis research: A scientometric analysis

“…Citation bursts on the other hand refer to suddenly increasing citation frequency which indicates that the report focuses on a key issue in the eld. [16] Table 2 shows references and corresponding information for the top 10 strongest citation bursts.…”

Reviewing Research Trends—A Scientometric Approach Using Gunshot Residue (GSR) Literature as an Example

“…Bibliometrics is a statistical and quantitative method used to analyse publications and visualise networks associated with a body of literature (e.g., [8,9]). Such an approach is being employed in systematic reviews and can potentially reveal unknown relations between different areas of research, and such findings have been demonstrated in literature-based discovery (e.g., [10][11][12]) or the study of citation impact indicator (e.g., [13]). In this work, a simplified scientometric approach (a subfield of bibliometrics with a focus on analysing the scientific literature) has been applied to the available literature on gunshot residue (GSR) to identify patterns and trends in, for example, keyword, co-authorship, collaborative networks, country of origin and citations rates.…”