Publication Support
Journal selection, manuscript writing, submission and reviewer response.
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Bibliometric mapping that turns a literature pile into a defensible research gap.
Reading two hundred papers tells you what has been done. Mapping two thousand tells you what has not — and a research gap you can point to on a map is a great deal easier to defend than one you assert.
Bibliometric analysis treats the literature itself as data. Instead of summarising papers one at a time, it looks at how they cite each other, which authors work together, which keywords occur in the same abstracts, and how all of that has changed over time. VOSviewer draws the result as a network, and the clusters in that network are the sub-fields of your area.
This does two things for a thesis. It gives Chapter 2 a structure that is derived from the field rather than imposed by you, and it lets you demonstrate the gap rather than claim it. Showing an examiner a keyword map with a sparse region between two dense clusters is a far stronger argument than writing that 'limited research exists'.
The poster sets out the five stages: literature collection and screening, bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer mapping and visualisation, trend and keyword analysis, and the insightful report with discussion. The last of those is where the value sits — a map without an argument is just a picture.
Everything from the first search string to the finished review manuscript.
In a systematic or bibliometric review the search string is the method. If it is too narrow you miss a sub-field and your map is wrong; if it is too broad you drown in irrelevant records and the clusters mean nothing. Reviewers of review papers scrutinise the string first, and a vague description of it is the fastest route to rejection.
We build it iteratively: seed terms from key papers, synonym expansion, testing against a set of articles we already know should be captured, then refining. Every version is kept, and the final string is reported in full along with the database, the date of the search and the filters applied, so anyone can reproduce it.
Screening then follows explicit criteria written down before it starts. Where two people screen, we record agreement. Where records are excluded at full-text stage, the reason is logged. This is the paperwork that makes a review credible, and it is the part most often missing from work that gets desk-rejected.
A review needs a question as precise as any empirical study. We frame it with you and decide whether the review is systematic, bibliometric or both.
Strings developed against known key papers, run in the chosen databases, with every version documented.
Title, abstract and full-text screening against pre-set criteria, producing the PRISMA flow diagram.
Deduplication, author disambiguation, keyword harmonisation — the unglamorous step that determines whether the map is meaningful.
Co-authorship, co-citation, coupling and keyword networks, plus overlay visualisations showing change over time.
The manuscript itself: structure derived from the clusters, gaps argued from the map, and a future-research agenda that follows from both.
Review papers are attractive to journals because they attract citations, but they are also held to a high standard because a weak review is worse than none. Editors look for a reproducible search, a transparent screening record, an analysis that goes beyond counting, and a discussion that says something the individual papers did not.
We help with journal selection on the same basis as any other manuscript: scope fit first, then indexing, then realistic acceptance prospects. Some journals publish bibliometric reviews routinely and others will not consider them at all, and knowing which is which saves months.
What we will not do is promise publication. Acceptance is decided by editors and peer reviewers, and any service that guarantees it is either misleading you or intending to use a route you should not want your name attached to.
| What you receive |
|---|
| Documented search strings with dates and filters |
| Screening record and PRISMA flow diagram |
| Cleaned bibliographic dataset |
| VOSviewer map files you can open and re-analyse |
| High-resolution network and overlay figures |
| Descriptive bibliometric tables |
| Gap analysis and future-research agenda |
| Draft review manuscript in the journal's format |
You need access to some indexed database to export the metadata. If your institution subscribes to Scopus or Web of Science, that is the cleanest route. If not, there are free alternatives such as Dimensions, Lens and OpenAlex, and we will tell you what each one can and cannot support in terms of analysis.
A systematic review synthesises the findings of a defined set of studies against a specific question. A bibliometric review analyses the structure of a literature — who publishes, who cites whom, which themes cluster. They answer different questions and are often combined, with bibliometrics used to map the field and systematic methods used to synthesise one part of it.
Yes, and it is one of the best uses of the method. A mapped literature review gives your chapter a structure derived from the field itself and lets you evidence the gap your study addresses instead of asserting it.
There is no fixed minimum, but below a few hundred records the network maps become sparse and unstable. A few thousand is comfortable. If your area is genuinely small we will say so and suggest a systematic review instead, where a smaller corpus is entirely appropriate.
Journal selection, manuscript writing, submission and reviewer response.
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Seven steps from consultation to acceptance, with nothing hidden in between.
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Dashboards, charts and reports that make a finding visible in one look.
Read moreSend your topic, your dataset or one draft chapter. We will tell you honestly what it needs — before you pay anything. The first consultation is free.