Building a Better Lit Review with VOSviewer

Scan the QR code to email yourself this guide's URL

https://libguides.library.nd.edu/vos-viewer

Before the Workshop, Please...

STEP 1—Install the program

• Visit vosviewer.com 
• Proceed to Download menu
• Download and install the appropriate version for your computer

STEP 2—Once downloaded, open VOSviewer to make sure your installation was successful

• If the software asks you to give permission to turn on settings in your operating system you can click "Deny"—such settings can be changed later

STEP 3—Update Java if applicable

• When opening VOSviewer, you might be prompted to download the latest version of Java before the application will function. 
• If so, download Java at java.com

Agenda

The goal for this 1-hour session is to cover 1) key tips for literature reviews that will be relevant to everyone regardless of your discipline, 2) key features/analysis types in VOSviewer to be aware of, 3) how to get data for use in VOSviewer, and 4) Demo 1: Citation Mapping (includes importing data, creating a visualization, viewing details about our visualization, and exporting/sharing our visualization).
 

Lit Reviews Overview (~5 min)

• What is a Lit Review?
• Why Conduct a Lit Review?
• Planning Your Lit Review

VOSviewer Overview (~10 min)

• Context, Key Terms, & Resources
• Choosing an Analysis Type
• Getting Web of Science Citation Data for use in VOSviewer

VOSviewer Demo and Hands-on Time (~40 min)

• Getting Started in VOSViewer 
• Demo 1: Citation Maps 
  • Select an analysis type
  • Change your visualization display
  • Explore your visualization items and clusters
  • Export and share your visualization
• Demo 2: Bibliographic Coupling Maps - Document Analysis
• Demo 3: Bibliographic Coupling Maps - Source Analysis
• Demo 4: Co-Citation Maps
• Demo 5: Co-Authorship Maps

Summary of 7 literature review tool options (including VOSviewer)

"Visualization of Similarities" Viewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing relationships between scholarly works and researchers, such as connections between journals, authors, and individual publications. 

• Explore your search results to answer questions such as...
   
  • What works appear to be the most important/influential?
  • Who collaborates with whom?
  • Which journals publish on a given topic?
  • ...and more!
     
• Visually express the relationships you surface
   
• Share your visualizations via static image or interactive diagram

The below example images display default versions of visualizations from a citation analysis of documents seeking to identify seminal papers on a given topic. These examples are based on the workshop demo data source, which uses results from a Web of Science search for "ADHD."

Default network visualization—circles 

Default network visualization—frames

Default overlay visualization—by citation count

Default overlay visualization—by publication year

Default density visualization

Export Images or Share Interactive Visualizations

• Link to example interactive visualization
• Screenshot of example interactive visualization landing page: