GeneticPrism: Multifaceted Visualization of Scientific Impact Evolutions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive visualization pipeline for depicting the evolution of a scholar's scientific impact across multiple topics using innovative 3D and glyph metaphors, aiding better understanding of academic trajectories.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated visualization framework with unique metaphors and layout algorithms to effectively illustrate individual scholarly impact evolution across topics.

Findings

Effective visualization of impact evolution demonstrated through case studies.

New 3D prism and glyph metaphors enhance interpretability.

Framework aids in understanding interdisciplinary influence.

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of scholarly impact is essential for many real-life decision-making processes in academia, such as research planning, frontier exploration, and award selection. Popular platforms like Google Scholar and Web of Science rely on numerical indicators that are too abstract to convey the context and content of scientific impact, while most existing visualization approaches on mapping science do not consider the presentation of individual scholars' impact evolution using curated self-citation data. This paper builds on our previous work and proposes an integrated pipeline to visualize a scholar's impact evolution from multiple topic facets. A novel 3D prism-shaped visual metaphor is introduced as the overview of a scholar's impact, whilst their scientific evolution on each topic is displayed in a more structured manner. Additional designs by topic chord diagram, streamgraph visualization, and inter-topic flow map, optimized by an elaborate layout algorithm, assist in perceiving the scholar's scientific evolution across topics. A new six-degree-impact glyph metaphor highlights key interdisciplinary works driving the evolution. The proposed visualization methods are evaluated through case studies analyzing the careers of prestigious Turing award laureates and a major visualization venue.