Science overlay maps: a new tool for research policy and library management

TL;DR

This paper introduces science overlay maps as a visual tool to locate, analyze, and track research activities across disciplines, aiding research policy, collaboration, and understanding of scientific evolution.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization method for mapping scientific outputs and demonstrates its applications in benchmarking, collaboration analysis, and temporal tracking.

Findings

Overlay maps effectively visualize research landscapes.

They assist in benchmarking and exploring collaborations.

Maps reveal dynamic changes in scientific fields.

Abstract

We present a novel approach to visually locate bodies of research within the sciences, both at each moment of time and dynamically. This article describes how this approach fits with other efforts to locally and globally map scientific outputs. We then show how these science overlay maps help benchmark, explore collaborations, and track temporal changes, using examples of universities, corporations, funding agencies, and research topics. We address conditions of application, with their advantages, downsides and limitations. Overlay maps especially help investigate the increasing number of scientific developments and organisations that do not fit within traditional disciplinary categories. We make these tools accessible to help researchers explore the ongoing socio-cognitive transformation of science and technology systems.