Research Guides: Research Impact Metrics: Locating, Evaluating, and Using: Visualizations

Visualizations

Many of the tools described throughout this guide provide built-in visualizations to show data and trends (e.g., Web of Science, Dimension Analytics, Altmetric Explorer, Scholar@TAMU), as well as the ability to export data to visualize in other software.

Web of Science - Author Impact Beamplot

Dimension Analytics - Research Outputs and Citations

Scholars@TAMU - Map of Science

There are additional tools that have specifically been developed to visualize bibliometric data from sources like Web of Science, Dimensions Analytics, PubMed, etc. Two of those software tools are VOSviewer and Sci2. There are several other freely available software packages for visualizing bibliometric data and networks.

VOSviewer Visualization

Sci2 Visualizations

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary database covering over 21,000 journals and conference proceedings from 1900-present. After setting-up/claiming a Researcher Profile, the Author Impact Beamplot provides an overall citation percentile median for the researcher based on their articles indexed in Web of Science over their career. A Citation Report with an H-index, number of publications, and citations can also be obtained.
Dimensions Analytics This link opens in a new window
The Dimensions database covers millions of research publications connected by more than 1.8 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents and policy documents. Offers a basic Researcher Profile with information on number of publications, citations, and grants. VOSviewer is integrated into Dimensions (Analytical Views -> Network).

Scholars@TAMU
A researcher profile system that hosts searchable expertise for faculty and TAMU organizations by gathering data from institution-level/enterprise systems, publicly available research data (e.g., grants and publications), and other authoritative sources. The data is compiled into a profile that you can edit to best represent your scholarship and expertise. Includes Altmetric.com data and citation counts from Dimensions.

Altmetric Explorer This link opens in a new window
Altmetric.com platform that enables you to monitor the online activity surrounding academic research. Browse by author, group, or department for your own institution, benchmark against peer organizations, report on the outcomes of outreach activity, and integrate the insights the data provides into evaluation and review processes. Includes mentions in policy documents and media outlets, patent citations, Mendeley saves, tweets, etc. for publications included.

VOSviewer
VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may 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. Supported file types include: Web of Science, Dimensions, Lens, and PubMed.
Sci2: The Science of Science (Sci2) Tool
The Science of Science (Sci2) Tool is a modular toolset specifically designed for the study of science. It supports the temporal, geospatial, topical, and network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets at the micro (individual), meso (local), and macro (global) levels.
Bibliometrix
Bibliometrix is a R software package providing a set of tools for quantitative research in bibliometrics and scientometrics. Bibliometrix provides various routines for importing bibliographic data from Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, Dimensions, The Lens, PubMed and Cochrane databases, performing bibliometric analysis and building data matrices for co-citation, coupling, scientific collaboration analysis and co-word analysis.
CiteSpace: Visualizing Patterns and Trends in Scientific Literature
CiteSpace supports bibliographic and citation data retrieved from major sources such as the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, CNKI, CSSCI, and a few other sources. Java Runtime (JRE) is required to run CiteSpace.
Pajek
Pajek is a software program for Windows that is used in the analysis and visualization of large networks.

Videos and Supporting Materials

Web of Science - Author Impact Beamplots [4-minute video]
Web of Science - Citation Report [2-minute video]
Dimension Analytics - Quick Start [6-minute video]
This training video walks new users of Dimensions Analytics through the database. It covers the many features and capabilities Dimensions Analytics has to offer to its users, such as search across publications, grants, patents, clinical trials and policy documents, abstract search, the Readcube integration, how to use the Dimensions badges, and the rich visualizations and comparisons that can be done using the Analytical Views
About Scholars@TAMU [Webpage]
Scholars@TAMU is a profile system that hosts searchable expertise for faculty and TAMU organizations by gathering data from institution-level/enterprise systems, publicly available research data (e.g., grants and publications), and other authoritative sources. The data is compiled into a profile that you can edit to best represent your scholarship and expertise.
How to track the influence of your institution's research [Altmetric Explorer | 54-minute video]
VOSviewer - Getting Started [Webpage]
This VOSviewer webpage includes an 11-minute video, manual, books, and articles.
BibSymp20 Training Session: VOSviewer [60-minute video]
Bibliometrics and Research Assessment Symposium 2020 presentation of VOSviewer for creating bibliometric networks by Karen Gutzman (Northwestern University).
Research Positioning & Trend Identification - A Data-Analysis Toolkit [eBook]
This 37-page booklet introduces diverse case studies on research positioning and trend identification. These case studies are relevant for PhD candidates, researchers, group leaders, and policy makers. Many of the case studies make use of VOSviewer.
NIH Bibliometrics Training Series - Collaboration Networks (Sci2) [90-minute video]
Introduces the major concepts of network science and provide a hands-on demonstration of how to create co-author networks from Web of Science data using the Science of Science (Sci2) Tool.
Visual Insights: A Practical Guide to Making Sense of Data [eBook]
A guide to the basics of information visualization that teaches nonprogrammers how to use advanced data mining and visualization techniques to design insightful visualizations. Many of the examples and cases shown use Sci2.