Visualization and quantitative study in bibliographic databases: A case in the field of university-industry cooperation

CiteSpace is a visual document analysis software, by which performances and trends of certain disciplines can be displayed for a given period. Moreover, the evolution of a frontier research can be explored by such software as well. This research focuses on the visualization and quantitative study in bibliographic databases by taking the university-industry collaboration studies as an example. Using the Web of Science (WOS), 587 publications and over 30,000 references were selected for analysis, which produced the following results: (1) Our method can clearly reveal the key elements of certain disciplines, such as the largest share of publications, the most frequently cited authors and journals in the university-industry cooperation research field; (2) The relationships among the frequently cited authors, references, journals and keywords can be explained visually in the university-industry cooperation research field; (3) Of special note is that the potential problems and evolutionary trends of certain research fields such as university-industry cooperation can also be ascertained via our method; (4) In general, according to the case study, our visualization and quantitative method evolved a new research framework to evaluate the performance of some research areas. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.