This study is about the visual analysis of author impact and other bibliometric data such as an authors publication history. It utilizes Publish or Perish as a data source, which is a search tool to find this bibliometric data. Bibliometric data is a concept within Bibliometrics with which to find and define notable publications, to draw a number of different conclusions, such as how much impact an author has had in a given field.
To do this we use information visualization techniques. Information Visualization is a field of science about increasing insight and understanding of raw data. It does this by researching on details of human cognition and perception and how data itself is modeled, and by categorizing 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 any real comparisons between authors, this thesis tries to rectify this by introducing a web based visualization tool to analyze this data. The data itself consists of a number of scientifically defined indexes which measures an author’s impact in his given field, an overview of his publication history,and some general bibliometric data.
Source: Linnaeus University
Author: Kostkevicius, Björn