CiteSpace
CiteSpace was developed by Dr. Chaomei Chen, Professor of Computing and Intelligence at Drexel University, CiteSpace is a Java-based information visualization software application that integrates citation analysis theory.The software can present the structure, law, and distribution of scientific knowledge, and the analysed graph is called a “scientific knowledge map,” which can show the theoretical viewpoints, evolution paths, development trends, and so on. It serves as a practical literature analysis software application for quantitative analysis.
CiteSpace has the function of analysing the co-occurrence of keywords, the number of citations, and the coupling between related documents, which is widely sought after. In addition, it provides a built-in file format conversion function, which can convert Refworks text exported from CNKI to a format that can be processed by the software for data visualisation and analysis.
With CiteSpace, the distribution of literature materials by year, authors, keyword co-occurrence, keyword clustering, and time zone distribution can be comprehensively analysed, and then a visual knowledge map of selected topics can be drawn. Figure 1 demonstrates the basic operation process of CiteSpace.
Figure 1. CiteSpace mapping process