Visualization Analysis of the Electrowetting-on-dielectric Research Domain Based on VOSviewer

Electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) is a very hot research topic in recent years, which has brought tremendous value to physics, biology, medicine and many other fields and an extensive body of literature has accumulated on it. Extracting valuable information from huge amounts of complex data and present them clearly can help to analyze the research priorities, understand the development changes and forecast the future development trends. Bibliometric analysis technology is the most effective method to do such job and is used in this article. Samples of 1605 articles related to EWOD are downloaded from the Web of Science database from 2003 to 2020 and networks of authors, institutions, keywords and literature citations are established by the information visualization software Vosviewer. The results show that Mugele, F. is one of the most outstanding authors with the most publications and a considerable citation amount in the EWOD research domain, the Twente University is the most productive organization and has strong collaboration with many other institutions. From the keywords clustering analysis, we can see that the research of EWOD can be grouped into three sub-domains: liquid lens and displays, lab-on-a-chip and digital microfluidics, and surface properties and dynamics. These three aspects have run through the whole development procedure of the EWOD research and will also be the most important hotspots in the future. The citation analysis results point out the most influential articles in the EWOD field which formed the research cornerstone, providing valuable reference and guidance to the readers and other researchers.