Visualizing Impact
Research impact can be analyzed and presented through statistics and tables alone. However, there may be cases where research impact is more effectively analyzed through graphs and visualizations, or cases where you would like to present research impact in an attention getting way.
Databases such as Web of Science and Google Scholar automatically generate simple graphs that chart citations. Using these graphs can be a quick way to visualize your research impact, but they are often limited to displaying one researcher at a time.
Below are some software, programming libraries, and other tools that can be used for visualizing research impact:
- Gephi (free)
An interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Works in synergy with Sci2 for complex analyses.
- D3.js (free)
D3.js (Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library that allows you to create and control dynamic and interactive graphs in a modern web browser. It makes use of common web standards such as SVG, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for data visualization.
- VOSviewer (free)
VOSviewer is an application that can be used to create, view and explore maps based on network data. VOSviewer is primarily intended to be used for analyzing bibliometric networks. The program can for instance be used to create maps of publications, authors, or journals based on a co-citation network or to create maps of keywords based on a co-occurrence network.
A guide to visualizing bibliometric data using Web of Science, and Gephi
If you are interested in creating and visualizing a collaboration network based on the authors you or your department have published with, the following step-by-step guide with screenshots will help you download bibliometric data from Web of Science, process and clean the data in Sci2, and visualize a network graph within Gephi.
For more information or assistance, email Library Impact Metrics team or Ask Us.