A survey on visualization for scientific literature topics

The topics in scientific literature illustrate the contents of science domain, and the evolution of topics help in recognizing the research trend and front. Since the number of scientific works is growing exponentially, it is a great challenge for people to discover new research topics and topic changes. Fortunately, aided by text mining, visualization technologies are being widely used for topic analysis. Visualization is an effective tool for revealing the current status and topic evolution trend in a research field. Owing to the importance of topic analysis as well as the lack of a comprehensive description of this theme, we present a survey on the visualization methods for scientific literature topics. This paper introduces the basic concepts of bibliometrics and the pipeline of topic visualization. Based on the topic analysis tasks, we classify these papers into three categories: topic contents, topic relation, and topic evolution. Furthermore, each part is divided into smaller categories on the basis of the visual patterns. Some existing free software that integrates multiple functions are also introduced. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the field of topic visualization.