Visualizing the research on pervasive and ubiquitous computing

The aim of this paper is to identify the research status quo on pervasive and ubiquitous computing via scientometric analysis. Information visualization and knowledge domain visualization techniques were adopted to determine how the study of pervasive and ubiquitous computing has evolved. A total of 5,914 papers published between 1995 and 2009 were retrieved from the Web of Science with a topic search of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. CiteSpace is a java application for analyzing and visualizing a wide range of networks from bibliographic data. By use of it, we generated the subject category network to identify the leading research fields, the research power network to find out the most productive countries and institutes, the journal co-citation map to identify the distribution of core journals, the author co-citation map to identify key scholars and their co-citation patterns, the document co-citation network to reveal the ground-breaking literature and detect the co-citation clusters on pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and depicted the hybrid network of keywords and noun phrases to explore research foci on pervasive and ubiquitous computing over the entire span 1995–2009.