Chapter 3 How to and use cases (some basic modes of VOS)

The VOSviewer has been officially introduced in an article in Scientometrics in 2010 (N. J. van Eck and Waltman 2010) . As the researchers ask you to cite this publication when you are using the VOSviewer in scholarly publications, there is a lot information on the formal usage. Of course we have to do a little meta research into the scholarly uses of the software.

The following topics will guide you through some analyses you can use with VOSviewer. At the same time they will introduce several techniques for gathering data. However, it is usually no problem to switch out data gathering techniques, so you might want to look at other examples.

The table below gives an overview of the topics and techniques covered.

Chapter	Analysis	Techniques covered	Sources
Topic overview	Basic text analysis that can be used for gathering keywords, getting a field overview and finding knowledge gaps	text analysis	Web of Science
Seminal papers	Analysis of citation links to find the most important articles to read in order to understand the field	Bibliographic network based on articles	Web of Science
Seminal papers 2	Analysis of citation links to find the most important articles to read in order to understand the field	Bibliographic network based on articles	Library Catalogue; DOI
Collaboration	Network analysis to see which authors are important in the field and might be useful for collaboration	Bibliographic network based on authors	thesaurus; filtering
Journals	Network analysis to see what journals you should follow and where you want to publish	Network based on sources
Topic analysis	Text analysis with scoring files to investigate clusters more closely	text analysis; text conversion; translation; scoring files	Nexis Uni

References

Eck, Nees Jan van, and Ludo Waltman. 2010. “Software Survey: VOSviewer, a Computer Program for Bibliometric Mapping.” Scientometrics 84 (August): 523–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0146-3.