Visual exploration of scientific literature with VOSviewer

In the academic year 2023-2024 this course will take place online. 

It is essential for PhD candidates and researchers generally to have an up-to-date understanding of the literature in their research field. However, keeping up with all relevant literature and obtaining a good overview of a research field can be challenging and highly time consuming. Bibliometric visualizations support this task. These visualizations provide intuitive overviews of the literature in a research field, enabling researchers to obtain a better understanding of the structure and development of a field and to get an impression of the most significant contributions made in the field.

In this course, PhD candidates will be introduced to the VOSviewer software for bibliometric visualization. Students will get hands-on experience in creating visualizations of their own research field. They will also be trained in interpreting these visualizations and in using them to deepen their understanding of their area of research.

After the course, you will know how to:

• Download data from bibliographic databases such as Web of Science and Scopus;
• Create bibliometric visualizations with the VOSviewer software;
• Use these visualizations for exploring the scientific literature in a research field.

Session 1:

• Introduction to bibliometric visualization and the VOSviewer software;
• Bibliographic data sources;
• Co-authorship and citation-based maps.

Session 2:

• Term/keyword co-occurrence maps;
• Overlay visualizations.