Mapping publications in science

In the US, a group of researchers from Indiana University are developing VIVO (as we've previously reported) a distributed social network, specifically designed for scientists to find the right research partner. The researchers hope the network will develop into a popular destination for scientists wishing to seek out colleagues with similar or complementary interests.

They've just released a map of science based on their social network, which shows the publication activity of any organization, person, or university in a VIVO instance, overlaid on the map of science.

This particular map shows the use VIVO's Map of Science visualization to see where the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida is active in the world of science, based on publications that have been loaded into VIVO.

 

Overlaid circles are larger if College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has many publications in that sub-discipline, and are smaller if College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has fewer publications in that sub-discipline.

Circles are overlaid on the Map of Science itself, which is made of 554 interconnected sub-disciplines, shown as grey dots here. A sub-discipline is defined as a cluster of journals. The Map of Science groups over 16,000 journals into 554 sub-disciplines using similarities in their lists of references and key terms. Sub-disciplines that are especially similar to one another are interconnected, and will be closer to one another on the map.