Understanding the Flow and Structure of the Literature through Bibliometrics

Lecture materials that introduce, with hands-on practice, how to grasp the structure and flow of a field’s literature using bibliometrics and topic modeling.
Lecture
Workshop
Published

August 1, 2024

Keywords

bibliometrics, topic modeling, science mapping, VOSviewer, R

Overview

These are lecture materials I prepared in August 2024 for researchers who want to understand research trends and use them in their own work. They explain why bibliometrics and topic modeling matter and what questions each method answers, and they are organized to show, through practice, the process of reading the structure and flow of a literature by using the two methods together.

Contents

  • Introduction: the purpose of the lecture, and the background that has made it possible to handle large volumes of bibliographic metadata.
  • Overview of bibliometrics: its definition, science mapping (the combination of classification and visualization), and its advantages compared with systematic literature reviews and meta-analysis (reduced bias, reproducibility).
  • Main methods: citation analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-author analysis, and co-word analysis. For each method I set out the research questions it can answer.
  • Use cases (my research): the research themes and intellectual structure of Human Resource Development Review and Human Resource Development International, the landscape of people analytics research, and changes in international human resource management research.
  • Use cases (acupuncture research): a comparison of several bibliometric papers in the acupuncture field by research scope, topics and keywords, publication trends, and collaboration among countries and institutions.
  • Methodological procedure: research design, data collection and processing, analysis, visualization, and interpretation.
  • Practice and demo: practice with bibliometric tools, topic modeling with R, and an analysis combining the two methods.

Tools and materials

  • VOSviewer.
  • R (bibliographic analysis, STM topic modeling).
  • HTML slides built with R Markdown (xaringan).
  • The bibliometric research papers cited in the slides.