What were psychologists up to in the last decade?

Thus, I wondered. I took the data of the 12 journals with the highest impact factors, according to the SSCI by Thomson Reuters from 2007 to 2017, reduced and extracted the the data (14299 Papers) with the VOSviewer to the 500 most cited, and therefore most interconected, conducted a cluster analysis and converted the whole thing to JSON with RapidMiner.

You can see the results visualized in D3 on the left. The colours indicate clusters of papers which stand for scholarly discussions, the links represent citations. Hovering will show you the bibliographical data, while clicking will take you to the page where the paper can be downloaded. Clicking and holding a note, then dragging it around will help to reveal the structure of the network.

The graph you see on the left is a very condensed version, but it gives an overview over some of the most influencial conversations in recent psychology. In larger versions (1000 papers & more), when I filtered the papers by conectedness rather than citations, the clusters that began to emerge were in part still thematic, but some began to recreate the original publications, expecially in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics and the Psychological Review, suggesting a large amount of conversations internal to the journal. But I have to play around with the data much more to say anything clear about that.

If you have some ideas what to do next with the data, or some other data sets you want to have a look at, or any suggestions, I am happy to hear from you: noichlmax@hotmail.co.uk