Visualization of Publication Impact

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new visualization technique for assessing scholarly impact by analyzing citation data, enabling comparisons of publication influence within research fields, demonstrated on high energy physics data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel visualization method for publication impact that considers citation quality and context, improving impact assessment beyond simple citation counts.

Findings

Effective visualization of citation impact in high energy physics

Ability to compare publication impact within research areas

Enhanced understanding of citation quality and influence

Abstract

Measuring scholarly impact has been a topic of much interest in recent years. While many use the citation count as a primary indicator of a publications impact, the quality and impact of those citations will vary. Additionally, it is often difficult to see where a paper sits among other papers in the same research area. Questions we wished to answer through this visualization were: is a publication cited less than publications in the field?; is a publication cited by high or low impact publications?; and can we visually compare the impact of publications across a result set? In this work we address the above questions through a new visualization of publication impact. Our technique has been applied to the visualization of citation information in INSPIREHEP (http://www.inspirehep.net), the largest high energy physics publication repository.