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Visualizing the intellectual structure with paper-reference matrices
Journal article

Visualizing the intellectual structure with paper-reference matrices

Jian Zhang, Chaomei Chen and Jiexun Li
IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, v 15(6), pp 1153-1160
Nov 2009
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.202
PMID: 19834184

Abstract

Visualizing the intellectual structure of scientific domains using co-cited units such as references or authors has become a routine for domain analysis. In previous studies, paper-reference matrices are usually transformed into reference-reference matrices to obtain co-citation relationships, which are then visualized in different representations, typically as node-link networks, to represent the intellectual structures of scientific domains. Such network visualizations sometimes contain tightly knit components, which make visual analysis of the intellectual structure a challenging task. In this study, we propose a new approach to reveal co-citation relationships. Instead of using a reference-reference matrix, we directly use the original paper-reference matrix as the information source, and transform the paper-reference matrix into an FP-tree and visualize it in a Java-based prototype system. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through visual analyses of the intellectual structure of two domains: Information Visualization and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The results show that our visualization not only retains the major information of co-citation relationships, but also reveals more detailed sub-structures of tightly knit clusters than a conventional node-link network visualization.

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27 citations in Web of Science
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Computer Science, Software Engineering
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