20.02.2015
Enseignement supérieur et recherche, Formations, Innovation, Ressources scientifiques et techniques
The researcher’s guide to literature: Visualising crowd-sourced overviews of knowledge domains
« Given the enormous amount of new knowledge produced every day, keeping up-to-date on all the literature is increasingly difficult. Peter Kraker argues that visualizations could serve as universal guides to knowledge domains. He and colleagues have come up with an interactive way of automating the visualisations of entire fields along with relevant articles. Through similarity measures identified in a Mendeley-powered data-set, a researcher can see the intellectual structure of a field at a glance without performing countless searches (…)
In our work, we therefore aimed at creating an interactive visualization that can be used by anyone. As a first case, we chose to visualize the field of educational technology, as it represents a highly dynamic and interdisciplinary research field. As described in a recently published paper in the Journal of Informetrics (Kraker et al 2015, openly accessible until March 3, 2015), the visualization is based on a novel data source – the online reference management software Mendeley. The articles for the visualization were selected from Mendeley’s research catalog which is crowd-sourced from over 2.5 million users from around the world and offers structured access to more than a 100 million papers (…)
Just go to Mendeley Labs (http://labs.mendeley.com/headstart) and try it for yourself! The source code is available on github: http://github.com/pkraker/Headstart«
