Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic visualization method for scholarly influence that captures the evolving citation network around researchers, providing a nuanced view beyond simple citation counts.

Contribution

It presents a novel animated visualization approach for scholarly influence that integrates citation networks and key indicators, applicable across various academic fields.

Findings

Effective visualization of influence over time.

Validated with collaboration from funding organization.

Applicable to large-scale citation data.

Abstract

Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators, highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design in collaboration with one funding organization---the Pew Biomedical Scholars program---but the methods are generalizable to visualizations of scholarly influence. We applied the design method to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which includes more than 120 million publications. We validate our abstractions throughout the process through collaboration with the Pew Biomedical Scholars program officers and summative evaluations with their scholars.