CiteSpace: A Practical Guide for Mapping Scientific Literature

by Chaomei Chen

CiteSpace is a freely available computer program written in Java for visualizing and analyzing literature of a scientific domain. A knowledge domain is broadly defined in order to capture the notion of a logically and cohesively organized body of knowledge. It may range from specific topics such as post-traumatic stress disorder to fields of study lacking clear-cut boundaries, such as research on terrorism or regenerative medicine. CiteSpace takes bibliographic information, especially citation information from the Web of Science, and generates interactive visualizations. Users can explore various patterns and trends uncovered from scientific publications, and develop a good understanding of scientific literature much more efficiently than they would from an unguided search through literature. The full text of many scientific publications can be accessed with a single click through the interactive visualization in CiteSpace. At the end of a session, CiteSpace can generate a summary report to summarize key information about the literature analyzed. This book is a practical guide not only on how to operate the tool but also on why the tool is designed and what implications of various patterns that require special attention. This book is written with a minimum amount of jargon. It uses everyday language to explain what people may learn from the writings of scholars of all kinds.

178 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

Dr. Chaomei Chen is a Professor of Informatics in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. He is a Chang Jiang Scholar at Dalian University of Technology, China since 2008 and was a visiting professor at Brunel University in the United Kingdom (2002-2008). He received his bachelor degree in mathematics from Nankai University, China, a master degree in computation from the University of Oxford in England and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Liverpool, England. His research interests include information visualization, visual analytics, knowledge domain visualization, mapping scientific frontiers, and theories of scientific discoveries and creativity.

His work has been cited over 7,950 times on Google Scholar. He is the principal investigator of research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other government agencies and industrial sponsors such as Pfizer and IMS Health. His earlier research was funded by the European Commission, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), and the Library and Information Commission (UK). Dr. Chen created the widely used software CiteSpace for visualizing and analyzing emerging trends in scientific literature. CiteSpace has been used by users worldwide.

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