Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time
This provides a more nuanced tool for funding organizations and researchers to visualize influence, though it is incremental as it builds on existing network visualization methods.
The paper tackled the problem of assessing scholarly influence by developing a dynamic visualization approach using citation networks, applied to over 120 million publications in the Microsoft Academic Graph and validated with the Pew Biomedical Scholars program.
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.