Well, we all know that adding “-ology” to a word makes it a science – geology, biology, scientology – oh, well, perhaps not scientology. The citeology project at Autodesk Research is a wonderful visualisation that shows the temporal relationship between references. The corpus to which the analysis is applied is currently quite small, extending to some 3502 papers in Human Computer Interaction conferences between 1982 and 2010 – 11699 citations are tracked. The ensuing diagrams give a compelling visualisation showing quickly just how many citations have been made to articles and in the corpus, which articles are uncited and what the temporal “reach” of an article has been. There is a nice app on the page that allows you to explore the data set. While this works well for smaller datasets, I wonder how this approach could be scaled to work with something of the size of the Web of Science or Scopus data sets?
Evidently, Justin Matejka is the force behind this work – a contact link can be found to him on the page mentioned above. A paper describing the approach by Justin and his colleagues Tovi Grossman and George Fitzmaurice is available here http://autodeskresearch.com/publications/citeology2.