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.

Download VOSviewer from https://www.vosviewer.com/

Scopus – CSV – most options for analysis (co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation, co-citation, bibliographic coupling)

• search by topic or desired publications
• select citations and click export – select CSV
• limited to 2000 articles
• include
  • Citation information
  • Affiliations
  • Abstract and keywords
  • Include references

Scopus – RIS – limited to author and co-occurrence (keyword)

• search by topic or desired publications
• select citations and click export – select RIS
• limited to 2000 articles
• include
  • citation
  • abstract

Web of Sciences – plain text (txt) – most options for analysis (co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation, co-citation, bibliographic coupling)

• search by topic or desired publications
• select citations and click export – select plain text
• limited to 500 articles
• include records from 1 to ???
• Record content – Full Record and Cited References

Web of Science – RIS – limited to author and co-occurrence (keyword)

• search by topic or desired publications
• select citations and click export – select RIS
• limited to 1000 articles
• include records from 1 to ???
• Record content – Author, Title, Source, Abstract

Create a map based on bibliographic data

Export in CSV format (Scopus) or TXT (Web of Science)

• Choose this option to create a co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling, or co-citation map based on bibliographic data  — click next
• Choose data source – select Read data from bibliographic database files  — click next
• Select files – click on tab of database source and select file from computer (.csv) – click next
• Click Co-authorship and Full counting  & Unit of analysis (Authors, Organization, Countries) and – click next
• Choose threshold – make choice — click next
• Choose number of authors – make choice – click next
• Verify selected authors
  • Before clicking finish, right click on the table (if you are using a PC), and click export selected authors.
    • you can use this table to create a thesaurus to clean up names.  (i.e. same author but name variations) or exclude names
  • Click Finish

Export in RIS format

• Choose this option to create a co-authorship or keyword co-occurrence– click next
• Choose data source – select Read data from reference manager files  — click next
• Under RIS tab, select file from computer – click next
• Click Co-authorship (or co-occurrence) and Full counting – change other setting you would like – click next
• Choose threshold – make choice — click next
• Choose number of authors – make choice – click next
• Verify selected authors (or keywords)
  • Before clicking finish, right click on the table (if you are using a PC), and click export selected authors.
    • you can use this table to create a thesaurus to clean up names.  (i.e. same author but name variations) or exclude names
  • Click Finish

Create a map based on text data

• Choose this option to create a term co-occurrence map based on text data – click next
• Choose data source – select Read data from a bibliographic databases (Scopus – CSV; WOS -txt) or read data from reference manager files (RIS) — click next
• Choose fields – Title and abstract fields, Title field  or abstract field)- click next   (if download included abstracts – abstract & title will be an option)
• Choose counting method – choose binary or full – click next
• Choose threshold – make choice — click next
• Choose number of terms – make choice – click next
• Verify selected terms
  • Before clicking finish, right click on the table (if you are using a PC), and click export selected terms.
    • you can use this table to create a thesaurus to clean up terms.  (i.e. same author but name variations) or exclude names
  • Click Finish

A thesaurus can be created to remove “stop” words or to standardize terms or names or affiliations

A thesaurus must be in a plain .txt table format

• by putting an alternative term in the replace by column the system will replace the label term with the replace by term
• by leaving replace by blank, the system will replace the label with a blank, removing the term from analysis (stop word)

• Co-authorship – authors writing in the same network, whether directly or indirectly
• Co-occurrence – Keyword co-occurrence
• Citation – which article cites another article (or which authors of the articles cites authors of author articles)
• Co-citation – Two publications are co-cited if there is a third publication
• that cites both publications (Marshakova, 1973; Small, 1973). The larger the number of publications by which two publications are co-cited, the stronger the co-citation relation between the two publications. (3rd pub newer)
• Bibliographic coupling is the opposite of co-citation. Two publications are bibliographically coupled if there is a third publication that is cited by both publications (Kessler, 1963). In other words, bibliographic coupling is about the overlap in the reference lists of publications. (3rd pub older)