VOSviewer-Assisted Thematic Evolution Analysis

VOSviewer-assisted thematic evolution analysis is a scientometric pipeline that uses the VOSviewer software to build keyword co-occurrence networks across chronological time slices of a bibliographic dataset, revealing how research themes emerge, converge, fragment, or disappear over time within a scientific field. By coupling VOSviewer's density-based clustering with period-by-period comparison, researchers obtain a visual and quantitative account of a field's intellectual trajectory.