Evolutionworks towards improved visualization of citation networks

Abstract

EvolutionWorks supports exploratory browsing of the academic paper citation network with an animated and zoom-able visualization that helps researchers explore the conceptual space that emerges from the relationships between academic papers. Metaphorically speaking, a researcher starts out with the seed of an idea that will grow into an unwieldy set of potentially useful papers that the researcher must prune into a final reading list. Accordingly, EvolutionWorks provides novel affordances to explore the citation network based on this seed-grow-prune model. First, kinetic layering represents abstract document properties as physical properties in a force-directed layout. Second, a unified layout shows the network graph and documents in a single view. Third, the focus-context-focus hop is a way to change focus from paper to paper that keeps researchers aware of the immediate context. Finally, if there is a tight cluster of papers, the system automatically creates cluster summary titles that are easier to read.