Science Diplomacy and Sustainability: Bibliometric Data and VOSviewer Maps (1996–2026)

This dataset contains derived bibliometric data and VOSviewer outputs underlying the study The Missing Middle of Science Diplomacy: From International Interaction to Distributed Capacity for Sustainability Governance. The source corpus was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection on 25 July 2026 using the exact phrase “science diplomacy” in the Topic field (title, abstract, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus), without temporal restrictions. The resulting corpus comprised 594 publications published between 1996 and 2026. Data for 2026 are partial and cover publications indexed up to the search date. The deposited files include aggregated Web of Science data on publication years, document types, Research Areas, funding agencies, countries/regions, and Sustainable Development Goals, as well as VOSviewer files and visualizations used to analyse the conceptual and geographical structure of the field. The keyword co-occurrence analysis was conducted in VOSviewer 1.6. Terms occurring in at least five documents were included, resulting in 71 terms. The deposited VOSviewer map and network files contain node labels, cluster assignments, occurrence frequencies, link and total-link-strength measures, and average publication-year and citation indicators. Network and overlay visualizations are also provided. A separate set of VOSviewer files documents international collaboration by countries/regions and includes network structure, document and citation indicators, cluster assignments, and average publication year, together with network and temporal overlay visualizations.