04. CiteSpace Roadmap and First Example

When you installed CiteSpace for the first time, a demonstrative dataset on terrorism research is setup for you to play with and get familiar with the major analytic functions in CiteSpace. If you have never used CiteSpace before, I strongly recommend you to start with this demo dataset.

To launch CiteSpace, double click on the StartCiteSpace.cmd file. You will see a command prompt window first. This window will also display various information on the status and any errors. 

You will see another window of “About CiteSpace” – it displays system information of your computer, including the Java version. To proceed, you need to click on the Agree button. CiteSpace may collect user driven events for research purposes. 

Next, you will see the main user interface of CiteSpace.

The user interface is divided into left and right halves. The left-hand side contains controls of projects (i.e. input datasets) and progress report windows. The right-hand side contains several panels for configuring the process with various parameters.

In a nutshell, the process in CiteSpace takes an input dataset specified in the current project, constructs network models of bibliographic entities, and visualizes the networks for interactive exploration for trends and patterns identified from the dataset.

The demo project contains a dataset on publications about terrorism research. These bibliographic records were retrieved from the Web of Science. See later sections on tips for how to construct your own dataset.

You have seen some of the basic moves. CiteSpace has many other features. We will introduce other features at more advanced levels.

The diagram below illustrates the most essential visualization and analytic functions of CiteSpace. The primary source of input data for CiteSpace is the Web of Science. The green route is for document co-citation analysis and a series of other analyses. The blue route is for generating dual-map overlays. The purple route is for text analysis. The orange route is for generating geographic maps that can be viewed in Google Earth.