1. ¹Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden
2. ²Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden

Correspondence: Niklas Elmqvist, INRIA/LRI, Bat 490, Universite Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France. Tel: +33 1 69 15 61 97; Fax: +33 1 69 15 65 86; E-mail: nickelm@acm.org

Received 14 August 2006; Revised 27 April 2007; Re-revised 22 August 2007; Accepted 24 August 2007; Published online 4 October 2007.

Abstract

We present CiteWiz, an extensible framework for visualization of scientific citation networks. The system is based on a taxonomy of citation database usage for researchers, and provides a timeline visualization for overviews and an influence visualization for detailed views. The timeline displays the general chronology and importance of authors and articles in a citation database, whereas the influence visualization is implemented using the Growing Polygons technique, suitably modified to the context of browsing citation data. Using the latter technique, hierarchies of articles with potentially very long citation chains can be graphically represented. The visualization is augmented with mechanisms for parent–child visualization and suitable interaction techniques for interacting with the view hierarchy and the individual articles in the dataset. We also provide an interactive concept map for keywords and co-authorship using a basic force-directed graph layout scheme. A formal user study indicates that CiteWiz is significantly more efficient than traditional database interfaces for high-level analysis tasks relating to influence and overviews, and equally efficient for low-level tasks such as finding a paper and correlating bibliographical data.