Chapter 2 VOSviewer Introduction and Theory

We decided to kick off our series on searching with artificial intelligence with an old faithful companion: VOSviewer. The application was actually created to make visualizations of bibliometric networks by Leiden’s Centre for Science and Technology (CWTS). This may seem like a strange choice: VOSviewer does not do any searching per se, you have to extract your search results and import them yourself. However, some techniques used in VOSviewer are also implemented in other solutions, and the information the tool provides can be very helpful to get a better understanding of your field of research, especially if you are starting out on a topic that is new for you as a researcher.