Visual Analysis of Author Impacts and Bibliometric Data

Abstract: AbstractThis thesis is about the visual analysis of author impact and other bibliometric data such as an authorspublication history. It utilizes Publish or Perish as a data source, which is a search tool to find thisbibliometric data. Bibliometric data is a concept within Bibliometrics with which to find and definenotable publications, to draw a number of different conclusions, such as how much impact an authorhas had in a given field. To do this we use information visualization techniques. InformationVisualization is a field of science about increasing insight and understanding of raw data. It does this byresearching on details of human cognition and perception and how data itself is modeled, and bycategorizing and developing new ways to encode and interact with data visually.Since Publish or Perish only gives its information as a raw text feed, and do not allow for anyreal comparisons between authors, this thesis tries to rectify this by introducing a web basedvisualization tool to analyze this data. The data itself consists of a number of scientifically definedindexes which measures an author's impact in his given field, an overview of his publication history,and some general bibliometric data.