In this working paper Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman present CitNetExplorer, a new software tool for analyzing and visualizing citation networks of scientific publications.
CitNetExplorer can for instance be used to study the development of a research field, to delineate the literature on a research topic, and to support literature reviewing.
The authors first introduce the main concepts that need to be understood when working with CitNetExplorer. They then demonstrate CitNetExplorer by using the tool to analyze the scientometric literature and the literature on community detection in networks. Finally, Nees and Ludo discuss some technical details on the construction, visualization, and analysis of citation networks in CitNetExplorer. You can download the working paper here.