Conducting bibliometric research on specific research topics - an example for Green Finance

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to do analyses by keyword or title word

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Fri 8 Nov 2024 11:01)

In addition to doing research on authors and journals, you can also conduct bibliometrics analyses on research topics. Many academics have used Publish or Perish to write up articles on the development of a particular research field.  The simplest of these analyses jut list the top-100/50/25 most cited articles published in a field, providing some cursory reflections.

Other articles present a more involved analysis of the longitudinal development of a field, its most popular journals, and the authors most frequently publishing in it. Yet more extensive analyses might include a thematic analysis based on an export of article abstracts or a visual representation of the research field using a programme such as VOSviewer that can import Publish or Perish data.

However, each of these analyses will start with a collection of the most cited articles in a particular field. PoP can help with this task by doing a search that uses either the Title words field or the Keywords field. The former will obviously result in a smaller subset of publications than the latter, especially in Google Scholar where search terms in the Keywords field are matched in the entire article. Below is a Google Scholar search for the relatively new topic of “green finance” in the Keywords field, with the first six results shown.

Note that I included quotes around the two keywords to ensure they appear together. Otherwise, your results might include highly cited publications that include the words green and finance separately, but are unrelated to green finance as such.

I also excluded patents and CITATION records (see also: Google Scholar - include/exclude stray citations and patents). First, it is unlikely that there are any patents for this search. Second, excluding CITATION records ensures a cleaner result as many CITATION records are stray citations. However, note that this will also exclude any books and other publications for which Google Scholar can find citations but not the publication itself.

Visualisation: longitudinal development

After exporting the full results of your search to Excel or another spreadsheet programme, you can easily create a graph of the growth of the number of articles on a specific research topic over the years. Below is a graph of the number of articles in Green Finance over the years. Interest in this topic has clearly exploded in the last five years.

However, all data sources are limited in the number of results they return, showing only the top 200 to 1,000 results by relevance and/or citations. This means that although the above graph gives an indication of the tendency of growth, it does not provide fully accurate number of the number of articles published by year.

To get a more accurate result of the number of articles per year, you will need to partition your results by year. This is easily done in PoP by duplicating the search and changing the year range. The screenshot below shows how the results for the green finance search in OpenAlex.

As expected, the correct number of articles published each year is higher than was found for a search for all years combined. Especially the number of publications in recent years will be underestimated as they are generally not yet highly cited. However, the conclusion of a strong increase in publications over the years doesn’t change.

Visualisation: analysis of themes

A quick-and-dirty visualisation can easily be done by exporting the abstracts and using a free Word cloud generator. It literally took me only a minute to export the OpenAlex results, copy the abstracts and create the word cloud shown as the lead image of this post. Whilst not sufficient for an academic it is a very easy way to get a quick overview of a research topic.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

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Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Fri 8 Nov 2024 11:01

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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