Visualizing Research Impact through Citation Data

摘要

Research impact plays a critical role in evaluating the research quality and influence of a scholar , a journal , or a conference . Many researchers have attempted to quantify research impact by introducing differentypes of metrics based on citation data , such as h-index , citation count , and impact factor . These metrics are widely used in the academic community . However, quantitative metrics are highly aggregated in most casesand sometimes biased , which probably results in the loss of impact details that are important for compretensiveunderstanding research impact . For example , which research area does a researcher have greatresearch impact on ? How does the research impact change over time ? How do the collaborators take effecton the research impact ofan individual ? Simple quantitative metrics can hardly help answer such kind ofquestions , since more detailed exploration of the citation data is needed.Previous work on visualizing citation data usually only shows limited aspects of research impact and may suffer from other problems including visual clutter and scalability issues . To fill this gap,we propose an interactive visualization tool,Impact Vis ,for better exploration of research impact through citation data.Case studies and in-depth expert interviewsare conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of Impact Vis.