Time range in time slicing

[Stephan De Spiegeleire]

With larger datasets, is there any way Citespace could automatically detect, based on the imported file type, what the earliest and latest years are in the datasets, and then automatically add those to the 'time slicing' pane? If not, isn't there an intermediate manual step possible to ascertain those dates and then add them to the dialogue box?

[Chaomei Chen]

I suggest you take the following preprocessing steps:
1. Data > Import/Export > WoS > Duplicate Removal
2. You will see from the report of 1 what is the range of your data. You can also tell the year as part of filenames.
3. Use the folder with these preprocessed files for your CiteSpace project instead of using the originally downloaded data files.

A good byproduct of taking this extra preprocessing step is that the records will be sorted by year and that will speed up your subsequent runs considerably; otherwise, CiteSpace has to check each file when it collects data for each time slice.