Network Visualizations

With the help of the free software VOSviewer, a visualization tool, and the most wonderful IT-expert within the UA Ruhr, we can illustrate collaborative research activities within the Materials Chain network.

The interactive map on our public website visualizes the fields on which our dense collaborative research activities were focused on during the last years by presenting the most frequently used keywords within the Materials Chain’s published output from January 2010 to October 2017.

The best way to understand the nature of this and other visualization graphics used on the Materials Chain website is to deal directly with the VOSviewer software and the interactive map created by it. You can either download the software free of charge from the official website or start the VOSviewer application directly (using Java) at the same address.

You can then read the files provided below into the program using the ‘open …’ tab and call up the map that had already been generated: Then you’ll have all possibilities to explore or modify the map. For example, via the right menu, you can adjust the size of the circles or the ratio of the line thickness.

Cluster formation can also be displayed and set differently in VOSviewer. For example, under the menu item ‘Weights’, you can either align the map according to the degree of networking among the authors (‘Total Link Strength’) or the number of publications per author (‘Documents’).

The input used to create the data set is based on publication data. To create the data set, all publications with a DOI number (current total of 14000 publications) stored in the Materials Chain database and the associated authors have been used. The clustering is based on an algorithm developed by the VOSviewer software developers and can also be influenced and the map recalculated (i.e. you can influence the number of clusters by adjusting the ‘resolution parameter’ or simplify the clustering by ‘summarizing’). Put simply, the algorithm used for our network visualization groups those people into a cluster who have published a lot with each other.

In case you have further questions on the visualization, please contact pia.aleithe@materials-chain.ruhr. For specific questions on the mapping and clustering techniques, please consult the technical publications on VOSwiever provided by the developers.

Files
Map file [TXT, 3 KB]
Network file [TXT, 5 KB]

Software
download VOSviewer software