Design ResearchScape. A visual exploration of Design Research publications

Abstract

In this paper we mix methods and approaches from scientometrics, co-citation analysis and network science, in order to build a set of maps and visualizations of the Design Research field. Bringing together this approaches could give us some tools to get an overview of Design Research discipline as it emerges from an extensive analysis of the scientific publications of the field. This way we provide also a sort of "visual literature review" of the field, a visualization of the discipline, as an alternative approach to already established reviews of the field. We built a dataset by downloading all the citation data from major design research journals (such ad Design Issues, Design Studies, International Journal of Design between others) from the Scopus online repository, obtaining a set of more than 1500 papers with all related data about authors, affiliations and references. Methodologies developed in the scientometrics field, such as co-autorship analysis, co-citation analysis, journal mapping, etc., are then performed in order to extract from the dataset some insights on the whole field.