Bibliometrics and data Science an example search and analysis of scientific information from the Web of Science (WoS)

ABSTRACT

This practical study shows, from the perspective of Information Science (CI), how the techniques and tools of Bibliometrics and Network Science can be used to map the knowledge of a research area or subject. Based on the problem situation of a researcher¹ who needs to make a bibliographic survey of the subjects: study of users and emotions involved in episodes of interaction with information systems, the study is developed. It seeks to answer questions such as: (i) what are the keywords that occur the most and how are they related? (ii) who are the most cited authors in the study area? (iii) what are the references shared by the authors of the documents? (iv) what are the main sources of the documents? Based on the subjects, the initial bibliographic survey and consultation on Google Books Ngram Viewer, a set of terms used in the search tools was determined: information science, user study, user experience, user emotion and user affect. The scientific databases were consulted: Web Of Science (WoS), Scopus, PubMed and SciELO. The metadata of 5427 documents retrieved from WoS was used in the VOSviewer tool to build, visualize and analyze the word co-occurrence networks (in English) and the co-citation networks of authors, references and sources. The results obtained show that the summarization, visualization and analysis of the networks allow the combination of elements for understanding information and knowledge of the studied area. They make it possible to explore general and specific aspects and, thus, point out possible paths and approaches to define the scope and delimitation of the research scope. In the context of searching, retrieving and analyzing scientific documents, the tools used were effective in identifying who the interlocutors are, what they discuss and their scientific production.

KEYWORDS:
Bibliographic search; Bibliometrics; Network analysis; User studies