Category Archives: oa.visualizations

Harnessing Scholarly Literature as Data to Curate, Explore, and Evaluate Scientific Research

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Abstract:  There currently exist hundreds of millions of scientific publications, with more being created at an ever-increasing rate. This is leading to information overload: the scale and complexity of this body of knowledge is increasing well beyond the capacity of any individual to make sense of it all, overwhelming traditional, manual methods of curation and synthesis. At the same time, the availability of this literature and surrounding metadata in structured, digital form, along with the proliferation of computing power and techniques to take advantage of large-scale and complex data, represents an opportunity to develop new tools and techniques to help people make connections, synthesize, and pose new hypotheses. This dissertation consists of several contributions of data, methods, and tools aimed at addressing information overload in science. My central contribution to this space is Autoreview, a framework for building and evaluating systems to automatically select relevant publications for literature reviews, starting from small sets of seed papers. These automated methods have the potential to help researchers save time and effort when keeping up with relevant literature, as well as surfacing papers that more manual methods may miss. I show that this approach can work to recommend relevant literature, and can also be used to systematically compare different features used in the recommendations. I also present the design, implementation, and evaluation of several visualization tools. One of these is an animated network visualization showing the influence of a scholar over time. Another is SciSight, an interactive system for recommending new authors and research by finding similarities along different dimensions. Additionally, I discuss the current state of available scholarly data sets; my work curating, linking, and building upon these data sets; and methods I developed to scale graph clustering techniques to very large networks.

 

VOSviewer goes online! (Part 1)

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Our VOSviewer software enables visualizations of bibliometric networks to be explored interactively. Nevertheless, VOSviewer visualizations often end up as static images in blog posts, research articles, policy reports, and PowerPoint presentations. In this way the visualizations lose a lot of their value, and in the end they may indeed be “just nice to look at but not useful or helpful”.

To address this problem, we have developed VOSviewer Online, a web-based version of VOSviewer released today. Using VOSviewer Online, visualizations of bibliometric networks can be explored interactively in a web browser. This makes it much easier to share interactive visualizations, and it reduces the need to show static images.

Adding interactive citation maps to arXiv | arXiv.org blog

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“We’re pleased to announce a new arXivLabs collaboration with Litmaps. The new arXivLabs feature allows arXiv users to quickly generate a citation map of the top connected articles, and then explore the citation network using the Litmaps research platform.

A citation network is a visualization of the literature cited by a research paper. The network shows how papers are related to each other in terms of concepts, subject areas, and history — and they’re valuable for analyzing the development of research areas, making decisions on research directions, and assessing the impacts of research, researchers, institutes, countries, and individual papers.

Readers can now view a Litmap citation network for a specific paper, directly from the arXiv abstract page by clicking on the “Bibliographic Tools” tab at the bottom of an abstract page and activating “Litmaps.” Using this tool, arXiv readers can now easily jump from articles they are interested in and use Litmaps’ custom visualization and automated search tools to find other critical articles they may have missed….”

New Visualization-Based Interface for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Daily Nous

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“Data engineer and developer Joseph DiCastro has created a visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) through which users can search for entries and see the connections between them. It generates attractive visualizations, but is also a well-designed, useful, and approachable tool for navigating the SEP.

 

“Visualizing SEP” provides clear visualizations based on a philosophical taxonomy that DiCastro adapted from the one developed by the Indiana University Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).

Type a term into the search box and suggested SEP entries will be listed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a simple visualization will appear with your selected entry at the center and related entries surrounding it. A brief summary of the SEP entry appears on one side of the screen, with a link to the full article, as well as a notation of the entry’s “primary domain,” (usually a philosophical subfield). On the other side is a list of the primary domains of the related entries. The domains and their corresponding entries are color-coded, too. If you’d like, you can flick a switch and the related entries appear as a list. You can also see the tallies of incoming, outgoing, and bidirectional links between the selected entry and others, and mouse over those indicators to highlight the corresponding linked entries….”

An Interactive Visualization of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Open Culture

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“The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the SEP, dispensed with the need for philosophy encyclopedias in print years ago. It’s “the most interesting website on the internet,” wrote Nikhail Sonnad at Quartz in 2015. “Not because of the content — which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself. Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia, or SEP, has managed to do for two decades.” …

Visualizing SEP “provides clear visualizations based on a philosophical taxonomy that DiCastro adapted from the one developed by the Indiana University Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO),” Justin Weinberg writes at Daily Nous. “Type a term into the search box and suggested SEP entries will be listed. Click on one of the entry titles, and a simple visualization will appear with your selected entry at the center and related entries surrounding it.” At the top of the page, you can select from a series of “domains.” Each selection produces a similar visualization of various-sized dots….”

MARKET WATCH – ESAC Initiative

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“The scholarly journal publishing market is in transition. While a great portion of publishers still operate their journals under the subscription paywall business model, open access publishing is keenly on the rise, as fully OA publishers and platforms are launched and come into maturity, scholarly publishers experiment a variety of new open access business models, and, not least, the number of research institutions and library consortia negotiating transformative agreements proliferates.

The visualizations below aim to inform the broader community of a number of key trends in the demographics and distribution of scholarly journal publishing in transition:

the relevance of publishers for scholars and scientists, as expressed in their share of scholarly articles published,
the growth of open access via transformative agreements and the impact these agreements have in enabling universal open access to the research articles produced on a local (country) and global (publisher) level, and
the costs and price points of article processing charges….”

Visualizing the research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia | Zenodo

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“Research takes place in a sociotechnical ecosystem that connects researchers with the objects of study and the natural and cultural worlds around them.

Wikidata is a community-curated open knowledge base in which concepts covered in any Wikipedia — and beyond — can be described and annotated collaboratively.

This session is devoted to demoing Scholia, an open-source tool to visualize the global research ecosystem based on information in Wikidata about research fields, researchers, institutions, funders, databases, locations, publications, methodologies and related concepts….”

Visualizing Book Usage Statistics with Metabase · punctum books

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“There is an inherent contradiction between publishing open access books and gathering usage statistics. Open access books are meant to be copied, shared, and spread without any limit, and the absence of any Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in our PDFs makes it indeed impossible to do so. Nevertheless, we can gather an approximate impression of book usage among certain communities, such as hardcopy readers and those connected to academic infrastructures, by gathering data from various platforms and correlating them. These data are useful for both our authors and supporting libraries to gain insight into the usage of punctum publications.undefined

As there exists no ready-made open-source solution that we know of to accomplish this, for many years we struggled to import these data from various sources into ever-growing spreadsheets, with ever more complicated formulas to extract meaningful data and visualize them. This year, we decided to split up the database and correlation/visualization aspects, by moving the data into a MySQL database managed via phpMyAdmin, while using Metabase for the correlation and visualization part. This allows us to expose our usage data publicly, while also keeping them secure….”

Visualizing Book Usage Statistics with Metabase · punctum books

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“There is an inherent contradiction between publishing open access books and gathering usage statistics. Open access books are meant to be copied, shared, and spread without any limit, and the absence of any Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in our PDFs makes it indeed impossible to do so. Nevertheless, we can gather an approximate impression of book usage among certain communities, such as hardcopy readers and those connected to academic infrastructures, by gathering data from various platforms and correlating them. These data are useful for both our authors and supporting libraries to gain insight into the usage of punctum publications.undefined

As there exists no ready-made open-source solution that we know of to accomplish this, for many years we struggled to import these data from various sources into ever-growing spreadsheets, with ever more complicated formulas to extract meaningful data and visualize them. This year, we decided to split up the database and correlation/visualization aspects, by moving the data into a MySQL database managed via phpMyAdmin, while using Metabase for the correlation and visualization part. This allows us to expose our usage data publicly, while also keeping them secure….”

Constellate

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“Learn how to text mine or improve your skills using our self-guided lessons for all experience levels. Each lesson includes video instruction and your own Jupyter notebook — think of it like an executable textbook — ready to run in our Analytics Lab….

Teach text analytics to all skill levels using our library of open education resources, including lessons plans and our suite of Jupyter notebooks. Eliminate setup time by hosting your class in our Analytics Lab….

Create a ready-to-analyze dataset with point-and-click ease from over 30 million documents, including primary and secondary texts relevant to every discipline and perfect for learning text analytics or conducting original research….

Find patterns in your dataset with ready-made visualizations, or conduct more sophisticated text mining in our Analytics Lab using Jupyter notebooks configured for a range of text analytics methods….”

How data sharing is accelerating railway safety research

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“Andre?’s dataset was shortlisted for the Mendeley Data FAIRest Datasets Award, which recognizes researchers who make their data available for the research community in a way that exemplifies the FAIR Data Principles – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. The dataset was applauded for a number of reasons, not least the provision of clear steps to reproduce the data. What’s more, the data was clearly catalogued and stored in sub folders, with additional links to Blender and GitHub, making the dataset easily available and reproducible for all….”

Library Leaders Forum 2020: Community : Internet Archive : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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“Video recording from the Library Leaders Forum: Community session. October 13, 2020.

A community of practice has emerged around Controlled Digital Lending, and its utility for libraries and educators has been amply demonstrated during library and school closures due to COVID-19. There are now hundreds of libraries that are participating in Controlled Digital Lending programs and using the library practice to reach their patrons while service is disrupted. In this session you’ll learn from librarians, educators, and technologists who are developing next generation library tools that incorporate and build upon Controlled Digital Lending….”

 

Introducing the Open Library Explorer

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“At the Library Leaders Forum 2020 (demo), Open Library unveiled the beta for what it’s calling the Library Explorer: an immersive interface which powerfully recreates and enhances the experience of navigating a physical library. If the tagline doesn’t grab your attention, wait until you see it in action….”

Exploration Engines – the koodos collective

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“Serendipitous use of the internet is slowly going extinct as we replace link-hopping with the algorithmic-feed. Ranked results and recommendations have become the dominant mode of exploring information online. In this experiment, we break away from this paradigm, and present Wikigraph – our project for Interhackt. While a “search engine” returns a ranked list of results, Wikigraph returns the most relevant sub-graph of pages. Such an application we term an “exploration engine.”…”

Visualizing Altmetric data with VOSviewer – Altmetric

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“Visualizations can make data come alive, uncover new insights and capture the imagination in a way that a spreadsheet never can.

Join Mike Taylor, Data Insights & Customer Analytics at Altmetric, and Fabio Gouveia, Public Health Technologist at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, for a demonstration of the exciting ways in which you can create compelling stories to explain the broader impact of academic work using the free-to-download VOSviewer from CWTS Leiden and data from Altmetric.

This actionable webinar will include an introduction to creating network diagrams with VOSviewer with your own data, extracting data from Altmetric tools and adapting it to be imported….”