Opus : exploring publication data through visualizations

Abstract

Scientific managers need to understand the impact of the research they support since they are required to evaluate researchers and their work for funding and promotional purposes. Yet, most of the online tools available to explore publication data, such as Google Scholar (GS), Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), and Scopus, present tabular views of publication data that fail to put scholars in a social, institutional, and geographic context. Moreover, these tools fail to provide aggregate views of the data for countries, organizations, and journals. Here, we introduce Opus, an interactive online platform that integrates, aggregates, and visualizes publication data from GS to present users with publication data at four different scales (e.g., scholars, countries, organizations, and journals). At each scale, Opus provides benchmarked visualizations that facilitate understanding the work of scholars in a social, generational, geographic, and institutional context. We conducted two user studies with a small group of potential users that show supporting evidence for the benefits of our approach. This design study contributes to the relatively unexplored but promising area of using information visualization to explore publication data.