VOSviewer Application Status and Its Knowledge Base

ABSTRACT

[Purpose/Significance]VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks which may include citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer Online creates the possibility to embed interactive visualizations on online platforms. The software's powerful functions in processing literature information, coupled with free and continuous improvement, are increasingly favored by experts and scholars in scientometrics and domain analysis. It provides a reference for users to use this tool for scientific research through quantitative analysis of VOSviewer's papers and the analysis of its knowledge base structure. [Method/Process] First we collected relevant documents from the Web of Science database, and then used the document co-citation network to obtain some documents and analyze the important documents in this field based on bibliometric analysis. [Results/Conclusions] It was found that the number of papers in this field has entered an explosive period of application after a relatively slow growth stage. It has been widely used by scholars in many countries and disciplines. The research topics involved the novel corona virus epidemic, sustainability, social media, sustainable development and supply chain, etc. Bibliometric theory and methods, software principles, database and network analysis have formed relatively solid research foundation in this field. There is also a great deal of misuse in the applied literature. For example, a survey of the highly productive scholars' papers found that the papers are often a direct interpretation of the results generated by the software, lacking the process of data cleaning and disambiguation, and there are a large number of errors such as duplicate authors, unprocessed singular and plural topics. 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. However, there are few applied research results in this area.VOSviewer Online has been integrated in Digital Science's Dimensions platform, making it very easy for Dimensions users to create VOSviewer visualizations of co-authorship networks and citation networks. © 2022 The authors.