Research Impact & Intelligence: Research Network Visualization Tools

A guide to our services in research intelligence and resources to learn more.

Research Visualization Tools

Visualization & Analytic Tools

VOSviewer
VOSviewer is a free software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. Data can be imported from Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and PubMed. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. 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.
CitNetExplorer
CitNetExplorer is a free software tool for visualizing and analyzing citation networks of scientific publications. The tool allows citation networks to be imported directly from the Web of Science database. Citation networks can be explored interactively, for instance by drilling down into a network and by identifying clusters of closely related publications.
CIteSpace
CiteSpace is a freely available Java application for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature. It is designed as a tool for progressive knowledge domain visualization (Chen, 2004). It focuses on finding critical points in the development of a field or a domain, especially intellectual turning points and pivotal points.
The rise of new citation indexes and the impact on Science mapping tools
An in-depth blog post reviewing new citation visualization tools, including Citespace, VOSviewer, Citation Gecko, and more.

Visualization Tools for Literature Discovery & Mapping

Connected Papers
Connected Papers is an online visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work. When you search for a paper, the tool analyzes an order of ~50,000 papers and selects a few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper based on concepts of co-citation (overlap of citations to the origin paper) and bibliographic coupling (overlap of references within the origin paper).
Citation Gecko
Citation Gecko allows you to search or import "seed papers" as a way to find other relevant literature based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling concepts. Essentially, Citation Gecko leverages citation links between seed papers and other papers to help highlight possible papers of interest.

Author Metric Tools & Template

Publish or Perish
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses a variety of data sources (including Google Scholar) to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents a range of citation metrics, including the number of papers, total citations, the h-index, and variations of the h-index. Publish or Perish is designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations.
Publish or Perish (PoP) Author Metrics Template
After you export data from Publish or Perish, you can use this template to showcase your citation metrics, compare to similar authors / scholars in your field, and make your case for an upcoming review or interview.
JYUcite & Co-Citation Percentile Rank (CPR)
The creators of this tool and metric argue that this is a fairer metric for comparison of citation impact. CPR compares the citation rate (citations / day since work became citable) of an article to the actual citation rates of articles that are co-cited along with that article. It uses data from Dimensions (primarily from Crossref). You can plug in a DOI for an individual item or your ORCID to pull CPRs for multiple items.

VOSviewer Visual Example

This is a visualization that represents the terms mentioned in titles and abstracts published by faculty in the VTCSOM Psychiatry Department. The larger the term or node, the more often that word occurs across publications. The connections or links between nodes/terms represents the number of times terms occur together in the same publication. The color represents the average number of citations received by publications that mention those terms. Overall, the number of publications represented here is 1,433 from a year range of 2010-2019.

Please also note that the terms in the top part of the visual, which indicate lower citation impact on average, likely need to be analyzed on their own, since the publications with those terms likely represent a different field or sub-field in psychiatry, whereas the terms in the bottom part with seemingly more citation impact represent research that focuses more on neurology and the brain, an area of research that tends to receive more citations on average.

Interactive VOSviewer Map (from above)
This interactive map of the term map above will allow you to highlight the terms and networks, zoom in, change the colors based on term clusters, publication year, citation counts, or normalized citation counts.