How are papers within your research field connected? What does a journal citation network in economics look like? What words appear most frequently in titles or as keywords in a set of references, and how are they distributed across time?
With VOSviewer, you can create a visual representation of research networks.
What is VOSviewer?
In the words of Leiden University´s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, where the service was born, “VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature”.
How can I use VOSviewer?
VOSviewer interacts smoothly with Web of Science and Scopus, both of which are major citation databases. However, if you want to build a single visual representation based on search results from both databases, you need to add an extra bit of excel magic.
If you are you versed in the use of APIs for bibliographic data, VOSviewer is also happy to process results from CrossRef and OpenAlex, a new and open catalog of scholarly contents that we expect a lot from in future.
To create your visuals, you need a dedicated desktop application. To share them with colleagues or to embed them on webpages or in Canvas, you need VOSviewer Online.
VOSviewer is developed and hosted by the Centre for Science and Technology at Leiden University, and is free of charge.