Leveraging citation networks to generate narrative visualizations of scholars’ careers

Abstract

We present an approach for generating dynamic narrative visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach includes an animated node-link diagram which shows the citation network accumulated around the researcher over the course of the career, with nodes and links appearing as the representation of the career progresses. Additional data provide more richness to the narrative, including timelines of key indicators, career milestones, and excerpts from qualitative interviews with the scholars. The intended audiences for this work include the scholars, who can enjoy and gain insight from a new way of looking back on their careers, and funding agencies, who have an interest in finding ways to evaluate the impact that their scholars have had.