Digital Lab: Getting an overview of your field with VOSviewer
Do you want a big-picture overview of the main topics in your discipline and how they relate to each other? Who writes most with who in your field, or which journals are cited by which others? Which journals or terms are used more recently with a field or a research group?
VOSviewer is a free tool for making and exploring visual maps of bibliometric networks – networks and clustering of, for example, co-authors, works, subject terminology used, citation relationships, or cooperation between countries and institutions. These can be overlaid with patterns in citations or publication year. This workshop will give a basic introduction to using VOSviewer.
Part 1 (1 hour):
The basics – Getting data, and expectations for VOSviewer: Analysis is useless if not based on good data. We will guide you through exporting a set of articles from Web of Science or OpenAlex, and discuss limitations that should be considered regarding data and VOSviewer’s functionality.
Part 2 (1 hour):
Creating and interpreting networks in VOSviewer: We will show how to import your data, produce and share different visualisations, and interpret the result. We will cover how to adjust the layout of your networks, use overlays, and combine or exclude items.
Part 3 (1 hour, optional):
Continue exploring your own analysis, with us on hand to answer questions and troubleshoot.
Target group:
This course is primarily aimed at PhD candidates and faculty, but may be of interest to some master students with a specific topic.
Requirements:
The tools used in this workshop work best for fields where most research is published in article format. Before the workshop, you should prepare by:
1) Installing VOSviewer v1.6.21 from https://www.vosviewer.com/ (external link) and checking you can run it on your laptop.
2) We recommend that you come with your own question you would like to use VOSviewer for: A research field/topic/group of authors/journals that you would like to explore. (We will provide demo question and search to use during the workshop for anyone who does not have this).