GeneticPrism: Multifaceted Visualization of Scientific Impact Evolutions

TL;DR

This work tackles the challenge of visualizing the evolution of a scholar's scientific impact in multi-topic contexts, moving beyond scalar indicators to context-rich, topic-aware representations. It introduces an end-to-end pipeline built on MAG data and GeneticFlow graphs, augmented by BERTopic-based topic modeling and novel visual metaphors: a 3D GeneticPrism overview, Topic Chord diagrams, and the detail-oriented GeneticScroll with a layered six-degree-interdisciplinarity glyph. An integrated flow hierarchical layout (IFHL) coordinates central topic graphs with inter-topic influence flows, reducing clutter through edge bundling and Sankey-style flow maps. Case studies on Turing laureates and a major visualization venue demonstrate the method's ability to reveal intra-topic trajectories, cross-topic transitions, and key interdisciplinary papers, offering a practical, scalable tool for researchers and administrators to analyze scholarly impact evolutions.

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of scholarly impact is essential for many real-life decision-making processes in academia, such as research planning, frontier exploration, and award selection. Popular platforms like Google Scholar and Web of Science rely on numerical indicators that are too abstract to convey the context and content of scientific impact, while most existing visualization approaches on mapping science do not consider the presentation of individual scholars' impact evolution using curated self-citation data. This paper builds on our previous work and proposes an integrated pipeline to visualize a scholar's impact evolution from multiple topic facets. A novel 3D prism-shaped visual metaphor is introduced as the overview of a scholar's impact, whilst their scientific evolution on each topic is displayed in a more structured manner. Additional designs by topic chord diagram, streamgraph visualization, and inter-topic flow map, optimized by an elaborate layout algorithm, assist in perceiving the scholar's scientific evolution across topics. A new six-degree-impact glyph metaphor highlights key interdisciplinary works driving the evolution. The proposed visualization methods are evaluated through case studies analyzing the careers of prestigious Turing award laureates and a major visualization venue.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: GeneticPrism interface: (a) control panel; (b) scholar demographics and GeneticFlow graph statistics; (c) chord diagram to display inter-topic citation influence interactions; (d) main GeneticPrism (current) or GeneticScroll designs visualizing Shirato graphs; (e) paper list and detailed info panel.
• Figure 2: GeneticPrism pipeline over MAG to illustrate scientific impact evolution: (a) data pre-processing; (b) GF analytics to build citation influence graph; (c) topic modeling for multifaceted analysis; (d) visualization designs.
• Figure 3: GeneticPrism design and its alternatives: (a) top view by a polygon chord diagram design; (b) side view visualizing the GF sub-graph on a topic; (c)(d)(e) alternative designs; (g) chord diagram to display inter-topic interactions.
• Figure 4: GeneticScroll design and its alternatives. (a) GeneticScroll composed of a GF sub-graph visualization in the center, influx/efflux streamgraphs on the left/right sides, and citation influence flow maps in between showing detailed inter-topic interactions; (b)(c) two alternative designs.
• Figure 5: Steps from the original GF sub-graph layout to the GeneticScroll view. (a) Original per-topic GF sub-graph; (b) GF sub-graph with influence edges; (c) GF sub-graph with influence edges using bundling; (d) GeneticScroll view: add flow map layout for influence edges and place them on the background layer, integrating with influx/efflux streamgraphs.