Seven clusters of data visualization articles in Scopus using social network analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyse the bibliographic characteristics and content of articles on Data Visualization published in journals indexed by Scopus written by researchers from throughout the world. We conducted a bibliometric and content analysis of publication in the Scopus database. We only retrieved articles written in English. We conducted content analysis using the VOSviewer software and visualized the co-occurrence of keywords and bibliographic coupling of sources and countries. Following the study protocol, we found 862 articles on Data Visualization over the past 30 years. The most productive journal that published these articles was Lecture Notes In Computer Science (n=32). The most productive country was the United States (n=305). Based on citations, the most influential authors, and journals were Thorvaldsdóttir et al., (2013) [Thorvaldsdóttir, H., Robinson, J. T., & Mesirov, J. P. (2013). Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV): High-performance genomics data visualization and exploration. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 14(2), 178–192.] (n=4699), and IEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (n=656). The keywords of research on Data Visualization formed 7 clusters (e.g. Data Visualization, Visualization, and Human). From a global perspective, Data Visualization research in the past 30 years has increased significantly. There were European published journals nominated publications. Thus, Asian countries need to conduct more active research on this topic.