Dynamic visualization of citation networks and detection of influential node addition

Abstract

In this paper, to effectively visualize the browsing order of scientific articles, we propose a visualization method for citation networks focusing on the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. In our method, all article nodes are embedded into polar coordinate plane, where angular and radial coordinates express the citation relations and order relations among articles, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method is equipped with a dynamic property to update coordinates of all nodes at low cost when a new article node and citation links are added to the citation network. From experimental evaluations using real citation networks, we confirm that our method explicitly reflects citation relations and browsing order compared with existing methods. Furthermore, focusing on changes in visualization results when new nodes and links are added to the citation network, our method can detect influential node and links addition by angular displacement of each node.