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Bibliometric Mapping Eight Decades of Analytical Chemistry
Bibliometric Mapping Eight Decades of Analytical Chemistry
Bibliometric Mapping Eight Decades of Analytical Chemistry
pubs.acs.org/ac
Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University, P.O. Box 905,
2300 AX Leiden, The Netherlands
Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics, Leiden University Medical Center, 2333 ZA Leiden, The Netherlands
S Supporting Information
*
ibliometrics is the study of interrelated bodies of documents, a prime example being the scientic literature. One
of its best known applications is the comparative evaluation of
countries, universities, research institutes, and individual
researchers, but it may also be used for other purposes, such as
gaining a better understanding of a elds structure or determining developments in research topics. It is the latter application that we will highlight in this Feature, by using automatic
bibliometric mapping tools to map developments within analytical chemistry.
Compared to more traditional historical methods, automatic
bibliometric mapping of scientic literature has the advantage of
relative ease and low laboriousness. Furthermore, the eld structure is established by (almost) automatic methods, producing a
more objective result than manual mapping could.
Mapping of networks visualizes multiple items (nodes) and
their underlying relationships (edges). The nodes can be different entities, e.g., authors, journals, or key terms occurring in
research papers. In addition, the edges can be based on dierent
types of data, e.g., in a network of authors one could determine
which authors co-author papers (a co-authorship network) or
who cites whom (a citation network).
The rst bibliometric maps were manually constructed citation networks.1 Gareld, Sher, and Torpie studied a book on the
history of genetics and compared the dependencies between
dierent studies as described by the author to the citational
patterns between the studies, and found that the two methods
2015 American Chemical Society
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
Feature
Analytical Chemistry
Figure 1. Overview of data and methods. The rst data source was all
articles published in Analytical Chemistry between 1929 and 2012. Titles
were extracted from metadata in XML-format and these titles were used
to nd the start of each article on the scanned and OCRed rst pages of
each article. By nding the start of each article the abstracts could be
extracted. For 19962012, the abstracts were available in XML-format
and extracted from these les. Titles and abstracts were used to make coword maps using the VOSviewer and to determine the use of several
techniques. The second data source was the Centre for Science and
Technology Studies (CWTS) version of the Web of Science, which
applies the NOWT classication to group journals into scientic elds.
This source was used to determine the contribution of dierent scientic
elds in MS research and determine the relative use of MS in each
scientic eld. The third source was also the Web of Science, but the
online version (Web of Knowledge), which holds the metadata of
scientic articles going back to 1945. This source was used to construct a
longitudinal citation network of MS research.
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
Feature
Analytical Chemistry
Figure 2. Evolution of the eld of analytical chemistry. Maps based on all texts published in Analytical Chemistry except for advertisements (19291995)
or on all articles, letters, and reviews published in Analytical Chemistry (19962012). The colors depict the cluster the term belongs to (cf. Table 2). The
size of the circle is proportional to the number of occurrences. The distance of two terms on the map reects the relatedness of the two terms, i.e., how
often they co-occur.
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Analytical Chemistry
Table 1. Glossary of Terms, Techniques and Software Tools
Bibliometrics
Citation network
CiteSpaceII
CitNetExplorer
Mapping
Clustering
Co-word map
HistCite
Sci2
VOSviewer
Mapping
Clustering
Web of Science (WoS)
Description
Color
Description
Description
Color
Description
19511960
Cyan
Chromatography
Sea green Electrochemistry
19611970
Cyan
Chromatography
Red
Inorganic chemistry
Red
Red
Green
Apparatuses
Yellow
Yellow
General/editorial
Cyan
19411950
Green
Apparatuses
Pink
Inorganic chemistry:
gases/halogens
Inorganic chemistry
Red
Inorganic chemistry:
metals
Industrial applications,
Dark blue Organic and food
hydrocarbons and food
chemistry
Yellow
General/editorial
Cyan
Industrial applications
and hydrocarbons
Color
19291940
Green
Apparatuses
Pink
Gases
19711980
Cyan
Chromatography
19811990
Yellow
General/editorial
Red
Inorganic chemistry
Red
Inorganic chemistry
Yellow
General/editorial
Cyan
Chromatography
Green
Pink
Apparatuses
Gases
Blue
Mass spectrometry
General/editorial and
informatics
19912000
Cyan
Chromatography
20012012
Sea green Detection, electrochemistry and
(bio)sensors
Purple
Electrophoresis
Brown
Small molecules and
quantitation
Sea green Inorganic chemistry, electrochemistry Blue
Mass spectrometry
and (bio)sensors
Yellow
General/editorial
Mustard Separations, microuidics, and
theory and simulations
Blue
Mass spectrometry and proteomics
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Analytical Chemistry
19411960 period are hydrocarbons, structural analysis,
quantitation, and gases (again, click the period to download an
interactive Java application of the map). The 19611970 and
Figure 4. Evolution of MS within analytical chemistry based on co-word maps. Maps based on all texts with the term mass spectro* in the title and/or
abstract published in Analytical Chemistry except for advertisements (19291995) or on all articles, letters, and reviews with mass spectro* published
in Analytical Chemistry (19962012). The colors depict the cluster the term belongs to (cf. Table 3).
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DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Table 3. Main Topics in Mass Spectrometry within the Field of Analytical Chemistry (cf. Figure 4)
Color
Description
19411960
Yellow
Purple
Dark blue
Structural analysis
Brown
Pink
Gray
Quantitation
Gases
Nondiscernible
19811990
Brown
Color
Description
Color
19611970
Mustard
Software
Green-brown Sample preparation, separations and
derivatization
Purple
Hydrocarbons and organic chemistry
19711980
Cyan
Brown
Green
Blue
Red
Yellow
Sea green
Compound quantication
19912000
Dark blue
Cyan
Chromatography
Purple
Sea green
Chemical ionization
Red
Pink
Sea green
Green
20012012
Blue
Sea green
Green-brown
Brown
Dark blue
the case for analytical chemistry generally. The maps also provide
the likely explanation that enabled this shift: the improvement of equipment, interfaces and software, and especially the
development of new physical techniques. Examples are the
development of chemical ionization and SIMS in the 1970s, and
MALDI in the 1990s. In addition, joining of older techniques and
MS is evident from these maps, such as the incorporation of
chromatography in the 1970s. These developments in turn
enabled the applications of MS in a wider area of research, such as
proteomics (enabled by several ionization techniques) and
polymer analysis (enabled by SIMS), which is also visible in the
maps.
Next, we set out to estimate how often MS was used over time
in all research elds, insofar as they are covered by the WoS
database. We determined how many articles in the WoS had the
term mass spectrometry in their title or abstract. The plotted
graph of this absolute number shows a large increase from 1981
until 2013 (Figure 5a, pink plot). The graph is discontinuous
between 1990 and 1991 due to abstracts being regularly included
into the WoS database only from 1991, including for journals
publishing many papers using MS, such as Journal of Biological
Chemistry, Journal of Chromatography, and Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. After the 1991 discontinuity, the
increase in use of MS is still considerable. In 1991, about 2 600
papers on or including MS were published; by 2013, this gure
had increased to around 16 000. However, the WoS database
expanded tremendously between 1981 and 2013, due to an
increasing number of journals being covered and each journal on
average publishing more articles per year (Figure S-1 in the
Supporting Information). Therefore, we also determined the
relative number of articles with MS in their titles or abstracts.
This analysis shows that MS was indeed increasingly used in
relative terms (Figure 5a, yellow).
This raises the question which scientic disciplines work on
(and with) MS. We determined which disciplines mainly contribute to research involving MS. To this end we used the
NOWT classication of journals, which classies journals
Description
Chromatography
Compound quantication and
secondary ion MS
Apparatuses and interfaces
(incl. informatics)
Chemical ionization
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Figure 5. Use of mass spectrometry in scientic literature and by scientic discipline, 19812013. (a) Number of MS papers in WoS database. The
search term used was mass spectrometry, which was searched for in the title and/or the abstract. (b) Share of scientic disciplines in MS research.
(c) Percentage of papers using the term mass spectrometry in title and/or abstract, per scientic discipline. Scientic disciplines are based on NOWT
medium categories, fractionally counted.
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Figure 6. Longitudinal citation network of mass spectrometry research, 19452013. The colors represent the cluster a publication belongs to the
colored numbers represent the cluster numbers in the table. Labels show the last name of the last author of a publication.
CONCLUSIONS
Bibliometric mapping reveals clear shifts in analytical chemistry
research topics from inorganic and (small-molecule) organic
chemistry to biochemistry and complex biomolecules. Furthermore, a sequence of new methods emerging and sometimes
replacing older ones is apparent in the time series analyses. It is
important to note that our ndings are, for the most part, neither
new nor even unexpected but rather support historical research
and the results from other bibliometric methods that have been
used to investigate the development of analytical chemistry.
However, we show here how these ndings can be obtained using
semiautomatic bibliometric mapping methods to visualize the
evolution of research elds in an unsupervised manner.
DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 45884596
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Analytical Chemistry
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
S Supporting Information
*
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to the American Chemical
Society for making data available for this study and technical
support. In particular, we would like to thank Catherine Boylan,
Emma Moore, David Martinsen, and Jerey Krugman. We also
thank Rob Marissen (LUMC) and Bjorn Victor (Institute for
Tropical Medicine, Antwerp) for technical assistance. Finally, we
would like to thank Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman (both
CWTS) and Michael Grayson for fruitful discussions.
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(8) Naturally, the use of a single journal as a representation of a eld is
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DOI: 10.1021/ac5040314
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