Seek for Success: A Visualization Approach for Understanding the Dynamics of Academic Careers

TL;DR

This paper introduces ACSeeker, an interactive visual analytics tool that explores how various factors influence academic career success over time, providing insights through dynamic visualizations and case studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-factor impact analysis framework and a visual analytics system for understanding the evolving influences on academic careers.

Findings

ACSeeker effectively reveals dynamic factor impacts on careers.

Case studies demonstrate its usefulness for researchers.

User feedback indicates high usability and insightfulness.

Abstract

How to achieve academic career success has been a long-standing research question in social science research. With the growing availability of large-scale well-documented academic profiles and career trajectories, scholarly interest in career success has been reinvigorated, which has emerged to be an active research domain called the Science of Science (i.e., SciSci). In this study, we adopt an innovative dynamic perspective to examine how individual and social factors will influence career success over time. We propose ACSeeker, an interactive visual analytics approach to explore the potential factors of success and how the influence of multiple factors changes at different stages of academic careers. We first applied a Multi-factor Impact Analysis framework to estimate the effect of different factors on academic career success over time. We then developed a visual analytics system to understand the dynamic effects interactively. A novel timeline is designed to reveal and compare the factor impacts based on the whole population. A customized career line showing the individual career development is provided to allow a detailed inspection. To validate the effectiveness and usability of ACSeeker, we report two case studies and interviews with a social scientist and general researchers.