Co-citation Network
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A co-citation network analysis of cited references examines the degree to which references are cited within the same document. Each node represents a single reference, and the size of the circle is proportional to the “total link strength” of that reference. The distance between two nodes indicates the link strength between two references as a measure of their relatedness. A connecting line indicates the co-citation links, and node colours indicate which cluster the reference belongs to.
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Analysis Type: co-citation analysis; Counting method: Fractional; Unit of analysis: Cited references; Thesaurus used to correct formatting errors; Minimum number of citations of a cited reference: 20 (Of 215,696 cited references, 181 met the threshold); Output: 6 clusters (see Table 2). Normalisation: by association strength.
Data
Patterns
A co-citation map provides insight into the most interconnected documents within the global research network. Much more than simply counting numbers of citations, a co-citation network reveals patterns of connection. In this case, there are 181 references organised into six clusters
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See supplementary resources for a complete list of all references: "Charting the Landscape of Presence in Virtual Reality Research: A Bibliometric Review", Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2025.
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The distinctive feature of this graph is the very high levels of relationality between clusters. The central large nodes in the map tend to focus on defining, measuring, and establishing a framework to understand presence (Cummings & Bailenson, 2015; Heeter, 1992; Lee, 2004; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Sanchez-Vives & Slater, 2005; Slater et al., 1994; Slater & Wilbur, 1997; Steuer, 1992; Witmer & Singer, 1998). These larger nodes around which a cluster centres are highly interconnected across clusters and are located in relatively close proximity to each other, indicating high levels of relatedness.
The top 30 references by citation count and "total link strength" were published between 1976 and 2019 (average of 2002). Despite the rapid growth of publication output since 2015, the majority of most co-cited documents have an average age of 13 years. This shows both the extended period in which presence has been researched and discussed while also highlighting the elusive nature of generating one authoritative definition and definitive measure of presence. The majority of the earlier articles are concerned with describing, defining, and explicating the concept of presence (Cummings & Bailenson, 2015; Heeter, 1992; Lee, 2004; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Sanchez-Vives & Slater, 2005; Slater et al., 1994; Slater & Wilbur, 1997; Steuer, 1992; Witmer & Singer, 1998), while more recent articles expand to explore the impact of presence on users (Diemer et al., 2015; Makransky et al., 2019; Sharples et al., 2008; Slater & Sanchez-Vives, 2016; Weech et al., 2019).