01. Introduction

CiteSpace is designed to answer questions about a knowledge domain, which is a broadly defined concept that covers a scientific field, a research area, or a scientific discipline. A knowledge domain is typically represented by a set of bibliographic records of relevant publications. It is your responsibility to prepare the most appropriate and representative dataset that contains adequate information to answer your questions.

CiteSpace is designed to make it easy for you to answer questions about the structure and dynamics of a knowledge domain. Here are some typical questions:

• What are the major areas of research based on the input dataset?

• How are these major areas connected, i.e. through which specific articles?

• Where are the most active areas?

• What is each major area about? Which/where are the key papers for a given area?

• Are there critical transitions in the history of the development of the field? Where are the ‘turning points’?

The design of CiteSpace is inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions. The central idea is that centers of research focus change over time, sometime incrementally and other times drastically. The development of science can be traced by studying their footprints revealed by scholarly publications.

Members of the contemporary scientific community make their contributions. Their contributions form a dynamic and self-organizing system of knowledge. The system contains consensus, disputes, uncertainties, hypotheses, mysteries, unsolved problems, and unanswered questions. It is not enough to study a single school of thought. In fact, a better understanding of a specific topic often relies on an understanding of how it is related to other topics.

The foundation of the CiteSpace is network analysis and visualization. Through network modeling and visualization, you can explore the intellectual landscape of a knowledge domain and discern what questions researchers have been trying to answer and what methods and tools they have developed to reach their goals.

This is not a simple task. Rather it is often conceptually demanding and complex. If you are about to write a novel, the word processor or a text editor can make the task easier, but it cannot help you to create the plot or enrich the character of your hero. Similarly, and probably to a greater extent, CiteSpace can generate X-ray photos of a knowledge domain, but to interpret what these X-ray photos mean, you need to have some knowledge of various elements involved.

The role of CiteSpace is to shift some of the traditionally labor-some burdens to computer algorithms and interactive visualizations so that you can concentrate on what human users are most good at in problem solving and truth finding. However, it is probably easier to generate some mysterious looking visualizations with CiteSpace than to fully understand what these visualizations tell you and who may benefit from such findings.

Hierarchically organized functions of CiteSpace, for example, GUI ►Pruning ►Pathfinder: true.