4.1 The Demo Projects

CiteSpace has 5 built-in demo projects. You can study these demo projects and get familiar with various configurations and how they may change the final results.

• Demo 1: Terrorism Research
• Demo 2: Scientometrics
• Demo 3: Scopus
• Demo 4: CSSCI
• Demo 5: CNKI

Both Demo 1 and Demo 2 use data directly from the Web of Science. Demos 3-4 are originally from non-Web of Science sources. It is necessary to convert the format of data to the Web of Science format so that CiteSpace will be able to recognize it.

We will start the process and explain how CiteSpace is designed to help you answer some of the key questions about a knowledge domain, i.e. a field of study, a research area, or a set of publications defined by the user.

Press the green GO! button to start the process.

CiteSpace will read the data files in the current project (Demo) and report its progress in the two windows on the left-hand side of the user interface. When the modeling process is completed, you have three options to choose: Visualize, Save As GraphML, or Cancel.

Visualize:

This option will take you to the visualization window for further interactive exploration.

Save As GraphML:

This option will save the constructed network in a file in a common graph format. No visualization.

Cancel:

This option will not generate any interactive visualization nor save any files. It allows you to reconfigure the process and re-run the process.

If you click on the Visualize button, a new window will pop up. This is the Visualization Window. Initially you will see some movements on your screen with a black background. Once the movements are settled, the background color turns to white.

Let’s focus on what the initial visualization tells us and then explore what else we can find by using additional functions.

First, CiteSpace visualizes a merged network based on several networks corresponding to snapshots of consecutive years. In the Demo project example, the overall time span is from 1996 through 2003. The merged network characterizes the development of the field over time, showing the most important footprints of the related research activities. Each dot represents a node in the network. In the Demo case, the nodes are cited references. CiteSpace can generate networks of other types of entities. Here let’s focus on cited references only for now. Lines that connect nodes are co-citation links; again, CiteSpace can generate networks of other types of links. The colors of these lines are designed to show when a connection was made for the first time. Note that this is influenced by the scope and the depth of the given dataset.

The color encoding makes it easy for us to tell which part of the network is old and which is new.

If you see that some references are shown with labels, then you will know that these references are highly cited, suggesting that they are probably landmark papers in the field. A list on the left side of the window shows all the nodes appeared in the visualization. The list can be sorted by the frequency of citations, Betweenness centrality, or by year or references as text. You can also choose to show or hide a node on the list.

A control panel is shown on the right-hand side of the Visualization Window. You can change how node labels are displayed by a combination of a few threshold values through sliders. You can also change the size of a node by sliding the node size slider.

To answer the typical questions we asked before, let’s use several functions in CiteSpace to obtain more specific information through clustering, labeling, and exploring.