GeneticPrism: Multifaceted Visualization of Citation-based Scholarly Research Evolution.

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of scholarly research 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 research, while most existing visualization approaches on mapping science do not consider the presentation of individual scholars' research evolution using curated self-citation data. This paper builds on our previous work and proposes an integrated pipeline to visualize a scholar's research evolution from multiple topic facets. A novel 3D prism-shaped visual metaphor is introduced as the overview of a scholar's research profile, 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, one major visualization venue, and a focused user study. The GeneticPrism web application is publicly available at https://genetic-flow.com.