Abstract: The amount of scientific information that is available nowadays is massive. Several millions of new scientific articles appear each year, creating an overwhelming amount of information even in relatively small scientific domains. Bibliometric visualizations, based on bibliographic meta data of scientific articles, offer an important tool to provide insight into this information, showing for instance how scientific fields are organized into subfields and how fields and subfields evolve over time. In my talk, I will present the freely available VOSviewer software tool (
www.vosviewer.com), of which I am one of the developers. VOSviewer is a widely used tool for creating and exploring bibliometric visualizations, for instance visualizations of co-authorship and citation networks, but also of the textual content of scientific articles. After giving an introduction into VOSviewer, I will discuss a number of lessons learned from the development of the tool. In particular, I will focus on the different ways in which the tool is used, and I will consider a number of fundamental challenges in creating visualizations that are truly helpful in getting a deeper understanding of science.
