VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. 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.
VOSviewer is a software tool for creating maps based on network data and for
visualizing and exploring these maps. The functionality of VOSviewer can be
summarized as follows:
• Creating maps based on network data. A map can be created based on a network that is already available, but it is also possible to first construct a network. VOSviewer can be used to construct networks of scientific publications,
scientific journals, researchers, research organizations, countries, keywords, or terms. Items in these networks can be connected by co-authorship, cooccurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling, or co-citation links. To construct a network, data from Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, PubMed, RIS, or Crossref JSON files can be used.
• Visualizing and exploring maps. VOSviewer provides three visualizations of a map: The network visualization, the overlay visualization, and the density visualization. Zooming and scrolling functionality allows a map to be explored in full detail, which is essential when working with large maps containing thousands of items.
Although VOSviewer is intended primarily for analyzing bibliometric networks, it can in fact be used to create, visualize, and explore maps based on any type of network data. VOSviewer has been developed in the Java programming language. Because Java is platform-independent, VOSviewer runs on most hardware and operating system platforms. VOSviewer can be downloaded from www.vosviewer.com. It can be used freely for any purpose.