6.8 Edit Project Properties
Under the Projects panel on the main interface of CiteSpace, select the project you want to edit. Then select the Edit Properties menu from the pull down list.
The Project Properties edit window will appear, as shown below.
You may either enter a value or leave it blank for using the default value for each of the properties. The default value of a property is shown as the first value in the parenthesis. For example, Alias List (on/off) means that if you enter "on", then the next run will have this feature enabled; otherwise, this feature will have no effect.
Noun Phrases
As a default, CiteSpace extracts noun phrases that consist of two, three, or four words and drops phrases outside this range. In our experience, this is in general the optimal choice. You may modify the default setting by entering the minimum number of words property, and/or the maximum number of words property, for example with min=2,max=5, or min=1, max=3.
Look Back Years
This property controls how far back a citation is allowed. Suppose paper A is published in year 2015 and it cites a reference R, which is published in 1978. The time span of this citation instance is 2015 - 1978 + 1 = 38 years. In other words, paper A looks back 38 years with respect to the reference R.
As an analyst, sometimes you may wish to limit the citation span, for example, to simplify the construction of the underlying network. In the example shown in the figure above, the look back span is limited to 10 years. Any citation instances that cite references published over 10 years prior to the publication of the source article will be ignored.
To remove the limit, simply use the value of -1 for this property, which is the default setting.
Using this feature may simplify the complexity of the network by filtering out long-range citation instances over time.
The k Nearest Neighbors
CiteSpace allows you to choose whether to impose an upper limit k on the number of neighboring nodes for a given node in the network. In the example above, the value of this property is set to be 5, which means that for each node n in the network CiteSpace will retain up to 5 nodes that have the strongest connections with the node n.
Similarly, if you do not need to impose any limit, then simply set the value of this property to -1.
Using this feature may simplify the complexity of the network, especially reduce the density of the network.