A comparison of two techniques for bibliometric mapping: Multidimensional scaling and VOS

TL;DR

This paper compares the VOS technique with multidimensional scaling for bibliometric mapping, showing VOS produces more accurate and artifact-free maps across various data types.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical relation and extensive experimental comparison demonstrating VOS's advantages over traditional multidimensional scaling in bibliometric mapping.

Findings

VOS maps lack artifacts present in MDS maps

VOS provides more accurate representations of bibliometric data

Theoretical relation between VOS and MDS established

Abstract

VOS is a new mapping technique that can serve as an alternative to the well-known technique of multidimensional scaling. We present an extensive comparison between the use of multidimensional scaling and the use of VOS for constructing bibliometric maps. In our theoretical analysis, we show the mathematical relation between the two techniques. In our experimental analysis, we use the techniques for constructing maps of authors, journals, and keywords. Two commonly used approaches to bibliometric mapping, both based on multidimensional scaling, turn out to produce maps that suffer from artifacts. Maps constructed using VOS turn out not to have this problem. We conclude that in general maps constructed using VOS provide a more satisfactory representation of a data set than maps constructed using well-known multidimensional scaling approaches.