How does CiteSpace automatically label clusters?

What is it about?

This article explains how CiteSpace divides a network of co-cited bibliometric entities into a number of groups, i.e. clusters, and how CiteSpace automatically generates labels for clusters so as to summarize the major themes of these clusters.

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Why is it important?

A bottleneck in the traditional scientometric studies such as document co-citation analysis and author co-citation analysis is the sense-making stage when analysts try to interpret various features and patterns highlighted in a visualized network of references, keywords, authors, or other types of entities. Conventionally, domain experts' inputs at this stage are particularly important. However, we cannot take for granted that we could access to domain experts whenever we wish. Automatically generated indicators, in this case automatically generated cluster labels, provide valuable intermediate steps to get a study off the ground.