APPLICATION OF CARTOGRAPHY TO THE DISPLAY OF BIBLIOMETRIC INFORMATION

The recognition of the utility of the analysis of the publications for the study of the research and technological activity has brought bibliometrics to a great development in recent years. Its use has been generalized in scientifically more developed countries and bibliometric studies are much more required and used both by scientific activity evaluators as well as researchers that need to know the journals with a greater excellence in their scientific area or discipline, in order to publish their works. However, many of the methods used by specialists in bibliometrics, coming from the interdisciplinary nature of documentation with other scientific disciplines, such as statistics or sociology, despite the apparent simplicity of its interpretation, present some difficulties for its interpretation for some researchers. In this study our main objective is to apply cartography techniques in order to display bibliometric information and to check if it is clearer to interpret the data by researchers and professionals from different disciplines. The analysis included the journals related with education indexed in the database Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in the Web of Science (WoS) included in the thematic category Education, Scientific Disciplines during the period 2002-2016. The total number of scientific journals collected in this thematic category of the JCR during the whole period analyzed is 41. It is observed that over the years, the number of journals included in this thematic category has not stopped growing, from 16 in 2002 to 41 in 2016, with a growth rate of 156% in the period 2002-2016. The application of the cartographic techniques to the analyzed magazines according to their geographic distribution facilitates the visualization of the evolution of the number of journals by publishing countries and their distribution by quartiles and impact factor throughout the analyzed period, observing that England, Netherlands, Scotland and United States, stand out for being the countries that have a greater number of journals of this discipline positioned in places of privilege (quartiles 1 and 2) in the JCR. The application of social network analysis techniques to the journals included in "Education, Scientific Disciplines" of JCR indicate that the main relationships of this thematic category are given with the thematic areas of "Education & Educational Research", "Health Care Sciences & Services" and " Engineering Multidisciplinary". It is observed that the "Education, Scientific Disciplines" area maintains relations with scientific disciplines related to the education sciences and also with other disciplines pertaining to the areas of medical sciences, engineering and technology and even humanities. The results of the work confirm that the application of the methods of representation for the realization of maps used in cartography facilitate the understanding and visualization of the results of the bibliometric studies, in the case of the representation of data analysed from a geographical perspective.