Citation-based clustering of publications using CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer

By Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman. Scientometrics, 2017

2,335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3782c403afee5d154f8fd72ca7a375abae341e8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Suparak Suriyankietkaew
2. Sara Hammer
3. M. Healy
4. Peter Mcilveen
5. Philip Hallinger

In Information Systems

1. Suparak Suriyankietkaew
2. B. Bartkowski
3. Sara Hammer
4. M. Healy
5. Peter Mcilveen
6. Stephan Bartke
7. Philip Hallinger

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Suparak Suriyankietkaew
2. B. Bartkowski
3. Sara Hammer
4. M. Healy
5. Peter Mcilveen
6. Stephan Bartke
7. Philip Hallinger

Citations in the corpus

• Leverage Points for Governing Agricultural Soils: A Review of Empirical Studies of European Farmers’ Decision-Making (2018, background): “Figure 3 indicate clusters identified by VOSviewer on the basis of cross- and co-citations [36]: the red cluster consists mainly of discrete choice experiments (CE) on AES participation; the dark blue”
• Mapping graduate employability and career development in higher education research: a citation network analysis (2020, methodology): “For analysis, we used CitNetExplorer (https://www.citnetexplorer.nl/), an application that visualises direct citation networks and identifies topic clusters within them (van Eck and Waltman 2014; 2017).”
• Past, present, and future of sustainable finance: insights from big data analytics through machine learning of scholarly research (2022, neutral): “…and the methodological choices and research contexts, and a science mapping via a temporal analysis using word clouds (Bastian et al., 2009; van Eck & Waltman, 2017) and a network analysis using keyword co-occurrence (Callon et al., 1983; Castriotta et al., 2019; Donthu et al., 2021a; Newman &…”
• Science Mapping of the Knowledge Base on Sustainable Leadership, 1990–2018 (2018, methodology): “These co-citation matrices serve as the basis for analytical techniques such as multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) and visualization of similarities (VOS) through bibliometric mapping [33,76].”