Cool citation relation visualisation
Ian Mulvany
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 13:25 UTC
I just stumbled on the Eigenfactor” citation maps. They provide an analysis of the impact of journals taking a weighting of citations based on subject.
Now they have a static map which shows the flow of citations between fields.
They also have an nice interactive visualization.
The connections are derived from apply their clustering algorithm to the 2004 ISI Journal Citation Reports.
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Replies
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I really like the use of redundant graphical encodings (color and size) in the static view of the graph, where the authors have ”...larger, darker circles indicating larger field size as measured by eigenfactor… [and] larger, darker arrows indicating higher citation volume.”
Unfortunately the authors only use this technique (redundant encoding) for the arrows in their interactive map and not the circles. I assume this is partially because the map doesn’t show a field of study in the context of the entire network, but only focuses on one field and its relationships to other fields.
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I got a chance to see a presentation from Carl Bergstron on Eigenfactor at Scifoo. It was very very cool (eigenfactor hadn’t quite gone live with it’s current content at the time).
The nice part is that it is a working framework and will only improve over time, but the concept and the theory are quite elegant and robust. I think publications should work with the Bergstrom group on making Eigenfactor even more relevant because it serves the cause of science in a good way
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