Investigating Trends of Scientific Productions and Knowledge Mapping of Hand-woven Carpet based on Scopus Database Data

 
 
 
Scholars and specialists in scientometrics are interested in designing the structure of science and Knowledge maps for different disciplines and following their latest changes. Scientific texts are the underlying foundation for this drawing.
The evaluation of the publishing trend of articles in various scientific fields provides insight into the efforts of researchers in the field of knowledge. The scientific map makes researchers more aware of the status of research and also discovers the thematic gaps of scientific research.
Bibliometric analysis is a powerful tool for quantitatively investigating scientific publications to evaluate research trends, find hotspots, and describe the research distributions and collaboration relations of countries/regions, institutions, and authors. Bibliometric is an objective technique of review. Bibliometric analysis is especially useful for providing a systematic analysis to deduct new research topics and recognize trends in various disciplines in contemporary environments where people have access to an inundated amount of knowledge, data, and conceptual developments.
The bibliometric analysis could generate useful information for researchers evaluating scientific activity. A bibliometric analysis examines bibliographic material from an objective and quantitative perspective that proves useful in organizing information within a specific field hence, a bibliometric analysis using keywords allows the analysis of details in the main topics of research within a domain and relationships at the micro-level. The traditional literature review presents an in-depth view of the field, while science mapping focuses on a wide breadth and can handle thousands of published studies; also, it can provide a graphical view of the interlinkages among different actors of research such as authors, journals, institutes, and countries.
Bibliometric methods are quantitative and visual techniques or statistics used to characterize patterns of research. Furthermore, it summarizes the status quo, dynamics, and development trends of a specific field of research, yielding consolidated ideas, directions, and guidance for future research activities. These methods can be applied over a wide range of contexts including research topics, sources, countries, and institutions. In their nature, they are quantitative techniques but can be utilized to generate pronouncements related to qualitative characteristics.
The focus of bibliometric methods is devoted to assessing the productivity and impact of research activities. These techniques are of high potential in providing valuable knowledgeable structures.
The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive and coherent picture of scientific outputs in the Hand-woven carpet industry based on scientific documents indexed in Scopus. Based on this statistical population, the number of 1231 articles on Hand-woven carpet, extracted from the Scopus database from 1969 to 2023, have been used as input data of VOSviewer software to examine and analyze research production process, a knowledge map, the lexical network and the Co-authorship by countries of Hand-woven carpet researches.
The visualization maps have been generated using VOSviewer software. This software utilizes clustering techniques and similarity mapping. The VOSviewer program can be used to establish bibliometric maps of authors or sources based on co-citation information. Moreover, it is possible to establish keyword maps based on the co-occurrence of keywords. Therefore, co-occurrence analysis of author keywords can be applied to build a network in a particular area, which aims to explore and exhibit the intellectual framework of a particular research field. In this study, we used VOSviewer software as a tool to perform the co-citation analysis and co-occurrence analysis, and then to realize the visualization of intellectual structure.
Based on this, answering the following questions is a step toward reaching the main goal of the research:
A-What is the trend of scientific studies and the most important fields of study in the art of handwoven carpet industry in the Scopus database during the years 1969 to 2023?
B-How are the core keywords and keyword co-occurrence map and density map of handwoven carpet research?
C-Which are the countries with high production and references in the field of handwoven carpets and also research centers active in this field? And how is the co-authoring network of countries?
D-How is the knowledge and co-authorship network of authors in the field of handwoven carpets?
In this regard, the data were collected and refined from the Scopus information database and were analyzed with algorithms based on social network analysis in VOSviewer software.
The results showed that scientific products of the Hand-woven carpet industry had associated continuous growth trend. The most productive subjects have been more business and management, materials, and engineering sciences than other sciences. In the co-authored network of countries, the United States was declared one of the most influential countries with the release of 146 documents. Also, Georgia Institute of Technology and Amirkabir University are among the most important research centers active in the field of handwoven carpets. Co-occurrence analysis of words revealed five research clusters in Hand-woven carpet studies related to the connections and flows of Carpet manufacture, Carpet industry, rug, weaving, and Textile industry. They had larger nodes and denser representations than other words. The maps showed that the studies have good network coherence, the study and analysis of the content of the texts can help to better understand the currents of thought in the Hand-woven carpet industry and as a roadmap for future research in this direction.