The review of literature through the Tree of Science

an example with

Abstract

The advent of the search for articles through the Web has made bibliographic research faster and more economical. Difficult, however, is to organize the huge amount of papers that return from the search. Although there are innumerable articles on the methods and techniques of research, there are few papers about techniques of literature review. Faced with this theoretical gap and the practical difficulty of master's and doctoral students in organizing the literature review in their academic works, this paper aims to present a useful tool for the organization of literature review of theses and dissertations: the Tree of Science (ToS). With this feature, researchers search the Web of Science (WOS) databases and create a text file with the selected references. Then, by submitting this file to ToS, the site constructs a tree, using graph theory concepts, through the analysis of the citation networks. The tree classifies the references found in three levels: root, which gathers the seminal articles; trunk, which aggregates structuring articles; and leaves, which indicate the recent articles. It is up to the researcher to design the branches, that means the approaches in which the articles are located.  As a way to bring an example of the use of the ToS tool, we search for the terms "Evaluation" and "Postgraduate". Our review organized four perspectives (branches): Postgraduate Evaluation / Capes, Productivism, Educational Evaluation, and Scientific Production. Through this example, the article demonstrates the usefulness of ToS for the organization of bibliographic research.