A design study of personal bibliographic data visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study on personal visualizations of bibliographic data. We consider three designs for egocentric visualization: node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices, and botanical trees to depict one's academic career in terms of his/her publication records. Case studies are conducted to compare the effectiveness of resulting visualizations for conveying particular aspect of a researcher's bibliographic records. Based on our study, we find that node-link diagrams are better at revealing the overall distribution of certain attributes; adjacency matrices can convey more information with less clutter; and botanical trees are visually attractive and provide the best at a glance characterization of the mapped data, but mapping data to tree features must be carefully done to derive expressive visualization.