Abstract
In this work the well known scientometric concepts of bibliographically coupled publications and co-cited references were applied to produce interactive maps of research fronts and knowledge bases of research fields. This article proposes a method and some standardization for the detection and visualization of research fronts and knowledge bases with two and three dimensional graphics inspired by geographical maps. Agglomerations of bibliographically coupled publications with a common knowledge base are identified and graphically represented by a density function of publications per area unit. The research fronts become visible if publications with similar vectors of common citations are associated and visualized as an ensemble in a three dimensional graphical representation as a mountain scenery measured with the help of a spatial density. Knowledge bases were calculated in the same way. Maps similar to the geographic representation of oceans and islands are used to visualize the two-dimensional spatial density function of references weighted by individual links. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by publications in the field of battery research.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boyack, K. W., & Klavans, R. (2010). Co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately? JASIST, 61(12), 2389–2404.
Chen, C. (2006). CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. JASIST, 57(3), 359–377.
Chen, C., & Morris, S. (2003). Visualizing evolving networks: Minimum spanning trees versus pathfinder networks. In Proceedings of IEEE symposium on information visualization (pp 67–74), Seattle, WA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Kessler, M. M. (1963). Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers. American Documentation, 14(1), 10–25.
Liu, Y., Matsumura, T., Imanishi, N., Hirano, A., Ichikawa, T., & Takeda, Y. (2005). Preparation and characterization of Si/C composite coated with polyaniline as novel anodes for Li-ion batteries. Electrochemical and Solid State Letters, 8(11), A599–A602.
Marshakova I. V. (1973). System of document connections based on references. Nauchno- Tekhnicheskaja Informacya, ser. 2, N6, 3–8 (in Russian).
Persson, O. (1994). The intellectual base and research fronts of JASSIS 1986–1990. JASSIS, 45(1), 31–38.
Price, D. D. (1965). Networks of scientific papers. Science, 149, 510–515.
Schiebel, E. (2011). Research fronts and areal density of bibliographically coupled publications In: E. Noyons, P. Ngulube, J. Leta (Eds), Proceedings of ISSI 2011—the 13th international conference on scientometrics and informatics, Durban, South Africa, 4–7 July 2011, [756–762].
Shibata, N., et al. (2009). Comparative study on methods of detecting research fronts using different types of citation. JASIST, 60(3), 571–580.
Small, H. G. (1973). Co-citation in the scientific literature: a new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24, 265–269.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schiebel, E. Visualization of research fronts and knowledge bases by three-dimensional areal densities of bibliographically coupled publications and co-citations. Scientometrics 91, 557–566 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0626-8
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0626-8