BIBLIOMETRIX: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis

Academic publications are dramatically growing at fast pace and it is increasingly unfeasible to keep track on all that is being published. Moreover, the emphasis on empirical contributions has resulted in a voluminous and fragmented research streams, and contested field. Nowadays, stand-alone literature reviews are extensively used in various fields for synthetizing findings from previous research, for using effectively the existing base of knowledge and enlarging its boundaries, for providing evidence-based guidelines to practice. Scholars use various qualitative and quantitative approaches to make sense of earlier findings. Among them, bibliometric analysis is a powerful approach to perform systematic, transparent and reproducible reviews, especially with big volumes of data (big data). This seminar has two main goals. The first is introducing all the different types of research synthesis. The second is presenting bibliometric analysis for systematic literature reviews. During the seminar, the PhD candidates will perform a bibliometric analysis. Goals The seminar will enhance PhD candidates’ skills for bibliometric analysis in the following stages: • Search: the choice of bibliographic databases; their professional use; the building of a dataset; the cleaning of data. • Appraisal: the choice of inclusion/exclusion criteria. • Analysis: the use of R package “bibliometrix”; the descriptive analysis (impact, productivity, trends, bibliometric laws); the analysis of conceptual, intellectual and social structures of knowledge (network analysis; data reduction analysis; thematic evolution). • Synthesis: data-visualization, with maps, matrices, and networks.