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.

Measuring the relatedness between bibliometric units (journals, documents, authors, or words) is a central task in bibliometric analysis. Relatedness measures are used for many different tasks, among them the generating of maps, or visual pictures, showing the relationship between all items from these data. Despite the importance of these tasks, there has been little written on how to quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of relatedness measures or the resulting maps. The authors propose a new framework for assessing the performance of relatedness measures and visualization algorithms that contains four factors: accuracy, coverage, scalability, and robustness. This method was applied to 10 measures of journal–journal relatedness to determine the best measure. The 10 relatedness measures were then used as inputs to a visualization algorithm to create an additional 10 measures of journal–journal relatedness based on the distances between pairs of journals in two-dimensional space. This second step determines robustness (i.e., which measure remains best after dimension reduction). Results show that, for low coverage (under 50%), the Pearson correlation is the most accurate raw relatedness measure. However, the best overall measure, both at high coverage, and after dimension reduction, is the cosine index or a modified cosine index. Results also showed that the visualization algorithm increased local accuracy for most measures. Possible reasons for this counterintuitive finding are discussed.

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

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.

Knowledge diffusion is the adaptation of knowledge in a broad range of scientific and

Science-Metrix specializes in the measurement and evaluation of science, technology and innovation. Our data collection and assessment methods include bibliometrics, scientometrics, technometrics, surveys and interviews, environmnetal scans, monitoring and intelligence gathering. We perform program and policy evaluations, benchmarking and sector analyses, market studies and strategic planning. Science-Metrix has a robust knowledge of life and environmental sciences.

A critical part of a scientific activity is to discern how a new idea is related to what we know and what may become possible. As the number of new scientific publications arrives at a rate that rapidly outpaces our capacity of reading, analyzing, and synthesizing scientific knowledge, we need to augment ourselves with information that can guide us through the rapidly growing intellectual space effectively. In this article, we address a fundamental issue concerning with what information may serve as early signs of potentially valuable ideas. In particular, we are interested in information that is routinely available and derivable upon the publication of a scientific paper without assuming the availability of additional information such as its usage and citations. We propose a theoretical and computational model that predicts the potential of a scientific publication in terms of the degree to which it alters the intellectual structure of the state of the art. The structural variation approach focuses on the novel boundary-spanning connections introduced by a new article to the intellectual space. We validate the role of boundaryspanning in predicting future citations using three metrics of structural variation, namely, modularity change rate, cluster linkage, and centrality divergence, along with more commonly studied predictors of citations such as the number of co-authors, the number of cited references, and the number of pages. Main

Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (DLA) is a model of fractal growth. Computer models can simulate the fast aggregation of millions of particles. In this paper, we propose a modified version of DLA, called semantically modified DLA (SM-DLA), for visualizing large-scale networks. SM-DLA introduces similarity measures between particles so that instead of attaching to the nearest particle in the aggregation, a new particle is stochastically directed to attach to particles that are similar to it. The results of our initial experiment with a co-citation network using SM-DLA are encouraging, suggesting that the algorithm has the potential as an alternative paradigm for visualizing large-scale networks. Further studies in this direction are recommended. 1.

Using Google Earth, Google Maps and/or network visualization programs such as Pajek, one can overlay the network of relations among addresses in scientific publications on the geographic map. We discuss the pros en cons of the various options, and provide software (freeware) for bridging existing gaps between the Science Citation Indices and Scopus, on the one side, and these various visualization tools, on the other. At the level of city names, the global map can be drawn reliably on the basis of the available address information. At the level of the names of organizations and institutes, there are problems of unification both in the ISI-databases and Scopus. Pajek enables us to combine the visualization with statistical analysis, whereas the Google Maps and its derivates provide superior tools at the Internet.

Grasping the fruits of “emerging technologies ” is an objective of many government priority programs in a knowledge-based and globalizing economy. We use the publication records (in the Science Citation Index) of two emerging technologies to study the mechanisms of diffusion in the case of two innovation trajectories: small interference RNA (siRNA) and nano-crystalline solar cells (NCSC). Methods for analyzing and visualizing geographical and cognitive diffusion are specified as indicators of different dynamics. Geographical diffusion is illustrated with overlays to Google Maps; cognitive diffusion is mapped using an overlay to a map based on the ISI Subject Categories. The evolving geographical networks show both preferential attachment and small-world characteristics. The strength of preferential attachment decreases over time, while the network evolves into an oligopolistic control structure with small-world characteristics. The transition from disciplinary-oriented (“mode-1”) to transfer-oriented (“mode-2”) research is suggested as the crucial difference in explaining the different rates of diffusion between siRNA and NCSC.