Quoka Atlas of Scholarly Knowledge Production: An Interactive Sensemaking Tool for Exploring the Outputs of Research Institutions

TL;DR

The paper introduces Quoka, an interactive tool that uses information retrieval to explore and rank research institutions based on scholarly output, aiding in understanding their contributions across fields and over time.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive atlas that combines faceted indexing and visualization to facilitate sensemaking of institutional research outputs.

Findings

Quoka effectively ranks institutions by research output for specific keywords.

The tool enables exploration of geographic and temporal trends in scholarly production.

Use cases demonstrate its utility in understanding institutional contributions.

Abstract

The vast amount of research produced at institutions world-wide is extremely diverse, and coarse-grained quantitative measures of impact often obscure the individual contributions of these institutions to specific research fields and topics. We show that by applying an information retrieval model to index research articles which are faceted by institution and time, we can develop tools to rank institutions given a keyword query. We present an interactive atlas, Quoka, designed to enable a user to explore these rankings contextually by geography and over time. Through a set of use cases we demonstrate that the atlas can be used to perform sensemaking tasks to learn and collect information about the relationships between institutions and scholarly knowledge production.