Visual exploration of academic career paths

Online bibliographic databases have become widely available and are important resources to scientific researchers. These databases store rich information and many evolve into digital libraries. Using a bibliographic database of a specific discipline, we can extract a co-authorship and citation network of individual professionals. This allows for the study of patterns in scholarly contributions as well as for the exploration of scientific disputes associated with an individuals career. We have designed a visualization tool, which we call PathWay, to discover and understand patterns and trends in the bibliographic data over a selected period of time. With PathWay, we conducted case studies on a bibliography of approximately 400,000 scientists in physics over a 26 year time period. In this paper, we show how PathWay can be used to characterize one's academic career path in terms of the publication record, conduct comparative studies that would be difficult to do with conventional search methods, and also provide a way to gain insight into the emergence and the career implications of the scientific disputes associated with publications.