Visual overviews for discovering key papers and influences across research fronts

Gaining a rapid overview of an emerging scientific topic, sometimes called research fronts, is an increasingly common task due to the growing amount of interdisciplinary collaboration. Visual overviews that show temporal patterns of paper publication and citation links among papers can help researchers and analysts to see the rate of growth of topics, identify key papers, and understand influences across subdisciplines. This article applies a novel network-visualization tool based on meaningful layouts of nodes to present research fronts and show citation links that indicate influences across research fronts. To demonstrate the value of two-dimensional layouts with multiple regions and user control of link visibility, we conducted a design-oriented, preliminary case study with 6 domain experts over a 4-month period. The main benefits were being able (a) to easily identify key papers and see the increasing number of papers within a research front, and (b) to quickly see the strength and direction of influence across related research fronts.

[1]  Victoria S. Uren,et al.  Sensemaking tools for understanding research literatures: Design, implementation and user evaluation , 2006, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[2]  Thorsten Joachims,et al.  Mapping subsets of scholarly information , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[3]  Eugene Garfield,et al.  Historiographic Mapping of Knowledge Domains Literature , 2004, J. Inf. Sci..

[4]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Scientific Paper Summarization Using Citation Summary Networks , 2008, COLING.

[5]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Integrating statistics and visualization: case studies of gaining clarity during exploratory data analysis , 2008, CHI.

[6]  Kristian J. Hammond,et al.  Reference directed indexing: indexing scientific literature in the context of its use , 2002 .

[7]  Alexander I. Pudovkin,et al.  Why do we need algorithmic historiography? , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[8]  Betsy Van der Veer Martens,et al.  Mapping research specialties , 2008, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[9]  Chris North,et al.  An insight-based methodology for evaluating bioinformatics visualizations , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[10]  Chad S. Carr.  Using Computer Supported Argument Visualization to Teach Legal Argumentation , 2003, Visualizing Argumentation.

[11]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Tree visualization with tree-maps: 2-d space-filling approach , 1992, TOGS.

[12]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature , 2006, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[13]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Searching for intellectual turning points: Progressive knowledge domain visualization , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[14]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Readings in information visualization - using vision to think , 1999 .

[15]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Visualizing knowledge domains , 2005, Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[16]  Marc Moens,et al.  Articles Summarizing Scientific Articles: Experiments with Relevance and Rhetorical Status , 2002, CL.

[17]  Manabu Okumura,et al.  Towards Multi-paper Summarization Using Reference Information , 1999, IJCAI.

[18]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Studying the History of Ideas Using Topic Models , 2008, EMNLP.

[19]  M. Newman,et al.  The structure of scientific collaboration networks. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[20]  Henry G. Small,et al.  Paradigms, citations, and maps of science: A personal history , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[21]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a research article? , 2008 .

[22]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  Citation Analysis, Centrality, and the ACL Anthology , 2008 .

[23]  Katy Börner,et al.  Mapping knowledge domains , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[24]  Kristin A. Cook,et al.  Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics , 2005 .

[25]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Strategies for evaluating information visualization tools: multi-dimensional in-depth long-term case studies , 2006, BELIV '06.

[26]  Noriko Kando,et al.  Classification of research papers using citation links and citation types: Towards automatic review article generation. , 2011 .

[27]  Gary G. Yen,et al.  Time line visualization of research fronts , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[28]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Designing Semantic Substrates for Visual Network Exploration , 2007, Inf. Vis..

[29]  Jean-Daniel Fekete,et al.  20 Years of Four HCI Conferences: A Visual Exploration , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[30]  Catherine Plaisant,et al.  The challenge of information visualization evaluation , 2004, AVI.

[31]  Anthony E. Cawkell,et al.  Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization , 2003, J. Documentation.

[32]  Mitsuhiko Toda,et al.  Methods for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[33]  Alexander I. Pudovkin,et al.  Mapping the Output of Topical Searches in the Web of Knowledge and the Case of Watson-Crick , 2003 .

[34]  Shannon Bradshaw,et al.  Reference Directed Indexing: Redeeming Relevance for Subject Search in Citation Indexes , 2003, ECDL.

[35]  Simone Teufel,et al.  Automatic classification of citation function , 2006, EMNLP.

[36]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Information visualization - beyond the horizon (2. ed.) , 2004 .

[37]  Kozo Sugiyama,et al.  A cognitive approach for graph drawing , 1987 .

[38]  Manabu Okumura,et al.  Bilingual PRESRI - Integration of Multiple Research Paper Databases , 2004, RIAO.

[39]  E. A. Leicht,et al.  Large-scale structure of time evolving citation networks , 2007, 0706.0015.

[40]  Chaomei Chen,et al.  Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon , 2006 .

[41]  John Domingue,et al.  Visualizing Internetworked Argumentation , 2003, Visualizing Argumentation.

[42]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.