IEEE VIS 2024 Content: Fields, Bridges, and Foundations: How Researchers Browse Citation Network Visualizations

Fields, Bridges, and Foundations: How Researchers Browse Citation Network Visualizations

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Kiroong Choe - Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of

 Eunhye Kim - Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of

 Sangwon Park - Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, SNU, Seoul, Korea, Republic of

 Jinwook Seo - Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of

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2024-10-16T12:57:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-16T12:57:00Z

Exemplar figure, described by caption below — We identified six patterns that researchers utilize to browse citation networks and discover papers of interest. Component-wise, these patterns can be classified to: Field (i.e., related papers on a single research topic), Bridge (i.e., logical connections between papers or topics), and Foundation (i.e., stages in the broad development of research). For each component, there were two different perspectives: layout-oriented or connection-oriented. Our analysis suggests that researchers generally preferred the layout-oriented perspective for its intuitiveness, but papers identified through the connection-oriented perspective were typically more useful.

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Keywords

Literature search, network visualization

Abstract

Visualizing citation relations with network structures is widely used, but the visual complexity can make it challenging for individual researchers to navigate through them. We collected data from 18 researchers using an interface that we designed using network simplification methods and analyzed how users browsed and identified important papers. Our analysis reveals six major patterns used for identifying papers of interest, which can be categorized into three key components: Fields, Bridges, and Foundations, each viewed from two distinct perspectives: layout-oriented and connection-oriented. The connection-oriented approach was found to be more reliable for selecting relevant papers, but the layout-oriented method was adopted more often, even though it led to unexpected results and user frustration. Our findings emphasize the importance of integrating these components and the necessity to balance visual layouts with meaningful connections to enhance the effectiveness of citation networks in academic browsing systems.