Exploring Large Scholarly Networks with Hermes

Every year, the number of scientific publications increases, adding complexity to the networks of collaborations, citations, and topics, in which papers are embedded. Analyzing these networks with efficient tools is important to help researchers identify relevant works and understand scientific impact. However, available tools face several limitations, indicating that there is still room for improvement. We present Hermes, a prototype for exploring large and heterogeneous scholarly networks. Hermes allows users to seamlessly navigate diverse types of networks within a single graph, spanning hundreds of millions of nodes and relationships. Our prototype achieves reasonable responsiveness on commodity hardware through: a) comprehensive indexing, b) a careful coupling of a graph database and a search engine, and c) incremental processing of temporal queries. In this demonstration, we explain the techniques we adopt and illustrate how to use Hermes for exploring theMicrosoft Academic Graph.