This workshop introduces students to systematic literature search on the Web of Science, analysing citation data, and citation network analysis for literature exploration. The primary purpose of this short course is to provide the skills and understanding necessary to pursue literature-based research projects. Originally designed for biomedical students at the University of Edinburgh, this course is now being made freely available for the SGSSS Summer School. The basic principles of review, systematic literature search, citation analysis, and the network analyses outlined throughout are generally transferable to most topics in the social sciences.
Students will be expected to have watched a series pre-recorded lectures that are accompanied by tailored step-by-step guides to the Web of Science and two network analysis tools. Students will first learn about the importance of systematic methods for literature review and the basic structure of a review. Students will then learn how to systematically search for literature relevant to specific research questions via advanced search queries in Web of Science, a large bibliographic database. Once comfortable with finding literature, students will then be introduced to analysis options within Web of Science to filter retrieved documents, to interpret citation data, and to download records for storage in reference managers, such as Zotero, and for network analysis. Finally, students will be introduced to two freely available tools to perform network analyses of bibliographic data – VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer – focusing particularly on citation network analysis.
During the workshop, students will be provided with a series of tasks to consolidate their training. The first hour will deal with performing a search on Web of Science for a literature that is of relevance for the student’s own research and describing the results with publication and citation statistics. In the second hour, students will then analyse this literature via network analysis in either VOSviewer or CitNetExplorer and describe the results.
Provided by Dr Rhodri Leng