New ways to map citation data reveal research trends
SEP 14, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025573
Chronicle of Higher Education : The emergence of hot new research fields, the relationships between existing fields, and the rate at which papers from different journals cite each other are among the patterns that pop out from new maps of journal citation data. In a feature story for the Chronicle, Jennifer Howard describes the work of a team led by two biologists, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall. Using data from about 7000 journals stored in the JSTOR online repository, the team has developed algorithms that could distinguish real trends from random fluctuations. To make those trends easy to spot, the team also deployed visualization methods. The mapping tools will become publicly available later this fall.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
