Scientific Maps: Methods and Techniques

Scientific publications are rapidly developing as a result of science domains development. Therefore tracing research trends in various domains of science has become a challenge. In fact, limitations of conventional methods of analysis of various domains of science and their weaknesses in representing a comprehensive view of knowledge, has led specialists of scientometrics and computer science to develop new methods to overcome it. In this direction, scientometrics specialists have been combined scientometrics indicators and methods with new visualization techniques to provide tools in order to study science and their relations. The aim of this study is to introduce methods of mapping the scientific maps especially co-word analysis and methods of text-mining analysis. This study tries to guide researchers to new fields of analyzing sciences structure.Therefore this paper focuses on the concepts of mapping scientific maps and verifying their methods try to explain theoretical foundations of scientific maps. Consequently suggests these maps to be used as a solution to convert the implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.