This article describes the latest development of a generic approach to detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. The work makes substantial theoretical and methodological contributions to progressive knowledge domain visualization. A specialty is conceptualized and visualized as a time-variant duality between two fundamental concepts in information science – research fronts and intellectual bases. A research front is defined as an emergent and transient grouping of concepts and underlying research issues. The intellectual base of a research front is its citation and co-citation footprint in scientific literature – an evolving network of scientific publications cited by research front concepts. Kleinberg’s burst detection algorithm is adapted to identify emergent research front concepts. Freeman’s betweenness centrality metric is used to highlight potential pivotal points of paradigm shift over time. Two complementary visualization views are designed and implemented: cluster views and time-zone views. The contributions of the approach are: 1) the nature of an intellectual base is algorithmically and temporally identified by emergent research-front terms, 2) the value of a co-citation cluster is explicitly interpreted in terms of research front concepts and 3) visually prominent and algorithmically detected pivotal points substantially reduce the complexity of a visualized network. The modeling and visualization process is implemented in CiteSpace II, a Java application, and applied to the analysis of two research fields: mass extinction (1981-2004) and terrorism (1990-2003). Prominent trends and pivotal points in visualized networks were verified in collaboration with domain experts, who are the authors of pivotal-point articles. Practical implications of the work are discussed. A number of challenges and opportunities for future studies are identified.

Welcome to Information Visualization! I am delighted to be able to introduce to you the first issue of the peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the research and practice of information visualization. The new journal will cover a variety of aspects of information visualization, ranging from fundamental research to practical applications. Information Visualization aims to provide a forum that can accommodate not only the unique focus of information visualization, but also the diverse interests of researchers and practitioners from an increasing number of disciplines.

We describe a novel approach to visualize bibliographic networks that facilitates the simultaneous identification of clusters (e.g., topic areas) and prominent entities (e.g., surveys or landmark papers). While employing the landscape metaphor proposed in several earlier works, we introduce new means to determine relevant parameters of the landscape. Moreover, we are able to compute prominent entities, clustering of entities, and the landscape's surface in a surprisingly simple and uniform way. The effectiveness of our network visualizations is illustrated on data from the graph drawing literature.

this article, we focus on the use of a particular approach to visualizing and tracking the growth of scientific paradigms. We illustrate the potential of this approach with two case studies. The first case study investigates the role of information visualization in tracking the growth of the study of mass extinctions. The second case study tracks down the line of research concerning whether there is a connection between mad cow disease and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). The rest of the article is organized as follows: we first provide a brief introduction to the key concepts and principles. Then we explain how our approach works and what types of structural and visual properties we should look for in the case studies. We describe two case studies in detail. We finally reflect on our experience with these case studies in the broader context of knowledge tracking and technology monitoring

Network evolution is a ubiquitous phenomenon in a wide variety of complex systems. There is an increasing interest in statistically modeling the evolution of complex networks such as small-world networks and scale-free networks. In this article, we address a practical issue concerning the visualization of network evolution. We compare the visualizations of co-citation networks of scientific publications derived by two widely known link reduction algorithms, namely minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and Pathfinder networks (PFNETs). Our primarily goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the two methods in fulfilling the need for visualizing evolving networks. Two criteria are derived for assessing visualizations of evolving networks in terms of topological properties and dynamical properties. We examine the animated visualization models of the evolution of botulinum toxin research in terms of its co-citation structure across a 58-year span (1945-2002). The results suggest that although high-degree nodes dominate the structure of MST models, such structures can be inadequate in depicting the essence of how the network evolves because MST removes potentially significant links from high-order shortest paths. In contrast, PFNET models clearly demonstrate their superiority in maintaining the cohesiveness of some of the most pivotal paths, which in turn make the growth animation more predictable and interpretable. We suggest that the design of visualization and modeling tools for network evolution should take the cohesiveness of critical paths into account.

ABSTRACT: Information visualization is an interdisciplinary research area in which cartographic efforts have mostly addressed the handling of geographic information. Some cartographers have recently become involved in attempts to extend geographic principles and cartographic techniques to the visualization of non-geographic information. This paper reports on current progress and future opportunities in this emerging research field commonly known as spatialization. The discussion is mainly devoted to the computational techniques that turn high-dimensional data into visualizations via processes of projection and transformation. It is argued that cartographically informed engagement of computationally intensive techniques can help to provide richer and less opaque information visualizations. The discussion of spatialization methods is linked to another priority area of cartographic involvement, the development of theory and principles for cognitively plausible spatialization. The paper distinguishes two equally important sets of challenges for cartographic success in spatialization research. One is the recognition that there are distinct advantages to applying a cartographic perspective in information visualization. This requires our community to more thoroughly understand the essence of cartographic activity and to explore the implications of its metaphoric transfer to non-geographic domains. Another challenge lies in cartographers becoming a more integral part of the information visualization community and actively engaging its constituent research fields.

The World Wide Web is opening up access to documents and data for scholars. However it has not yet impacted on one of the primary activities in research: assessing new findings in the light of current knowledge and debating it with colleagues. The ClaiMaker system uses a directed graph model with similarities to hypertext, in which new ideas are published as nodes, which other contributors can build on or challenge in a variety of ways by linking to them. Nodes and links have semantic structure to facilitate the provision of specialist services for interrogating and visualizing the emerging network. By way of example, this paper is grounded in a ClaiMaker model to illustrate how new claims can be described in this structured way.

this article, we focus on some of the practical issues concerning visualizing the dynamics of specialties in a scientific discipline. What are the key characteristics of scientific revolutions that should be featured in visualization models? To what extent do citation patterns track scientific revolutions? What are the growth patterns of scientific paradigms in terms of their citation impact and connectivity? In addition, we visualize the growth patterns of superstring revolutions in physics so as to illustrate the feasibility and viability of our approach

The information explosion is a serious challenge for current information institutions. On the other hand, data mining, which is the search for valuable information in large volumes of data, is one of the solutions to face this challenge. In the past several years, data mining has made a significant contribution to the field of information science. This paper examines the impact of data mining by reviewing existing applications, including personalized environments, electronic commerce, and search engines. For these three types of application, how data mining can enhance their functions is discussed. The reader of this paper is expected to get an overview of the state of the art research associated with these applications. Furthermore, we identify the limitations of current work and raise several directions for future research.

Dynamic criminal network analysis is important for national security but also very challenging. However, little research has been done in this area. In this paper we propose to use several descriptive measures from social network analysis research to help detect and describe changes in criminal organizations. These measures include centrality for individuals, and density, cohesion, and stability for groups. We also employ visualization and animation methods to present the evolution process of criminal networks. We conducted a field study with several domain experts to validate our findings from the analysis of the dynamics of a narcotics network. The feedback from our domain experts showed that our approaches and the prototype system could be very helpful for capturing the dynamics of criminal organizations and assisting crime investigation and criminal prosecution. 1.