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Srikant JakilinkiA new picture of science - and possibly future innovation - comes into focus with the mapping of scientists’ online research behavior.
What do scientists read when they don’t think anyone is looking? Is it possible to anticipate emerging areas of research before they exist? If we could take a real-time snapshot of innovation, what would it look like? For the first time, we may now have some answers.
Picture this: the whole of human knowledge as a figurative mind that can selectively focus on certain areas. It’s a profound notion, and visualizing such a construct is an enormous undertaking. But with last week’s release of a new “map of science,” a team of researchers led by Johan Bollen is attempting to do just that - with a high-resolution visualization of how scientific literature is accessed based on users’ downloading and browsing behavior, known as clickstream data. This usage data was collected, aggregated, and normalized across a wide variety of journal publishers and institutions. The result is a network map with color-coded nodes (clusters of research articles from different fields) and interconnected lines (shaped by users’ clickstreams), demonstrating the connections among a comprehensive sample space of scholarly research.
This isn’t the first attempt to extract meaning from the referential loops within scientific literature. In 2006, Columbia University’s W. Bradford Paley released an influential map of science based on data from Thomson Scientific, a firm that tracks article citations across scholarly journals. More recently, Carl Bergstrom, a biologist from the University of Washington, has developed a suite of innovative visualizations based on his own citation data sets for a venture called Eigenfactor. His method draws from network science and information theory to determine how often specific articles cite other articles as part of a relative ranking system for journals.
What makes the new map special is its use of clickstream data. “Bollen has shown clearly that people’s downloading behavior p -
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Inherent in citation data may also be what psychologists call a social desirability bias. Scientists tend to cite the same articles from the same top journals written by the same big-name authors — and rarely cite outside their specific field. “When scientists cite publicly, they act very differently than when they’re just looking at the literature and following their true interest
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The worth and importance of a scientist’s research is often determined by the prestige of the journals in which he or she has publishe
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Dione Wangnot yet used
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whole of human knowledge as a figurative mind that can selectively focus on
certain areas. It’s a profound notion, and visualizing such a construct is an
enormous undertaking. -
high-resolution visualization of how scientific literature is accessed based on
users’ downloading and browsing behavior, known as clickstream data - 6 more annotations...
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Alberto RigauA new picture of science — and possibly future innovation — comes into focus with the mapping of scientists’ online research behavior.
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Scott AshwellA new picture of science — and possibly future innovation — comes into focus with the mapping of scientists’ online research behavior. ... perhaps the most interesting story is the one not yet told — the unexpected breakthrough inspired by a scientist reaching out beyond his own field. And it’s certainly possible that eavesdropping on what researchers are reading will act as some sort of innovation bellwether, identifying and facilitating aha moments before they happen.
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