Kevin W. Boyack

Bio: Kevin W. Boyack is an academic researcher from Sandia National Laboratories. The author has contributed to research in topics: Citation & Citation analysis. The author has an hindex of 39, co-authored 111 publications receiving 7896 citations. Previous affiliations of Kevin W. Boyack include Brigham Young University.

Visualizing knowledge domains

Abstract: L'A. passe en revue les techniques de visualisation utilisees pour representer de facon cartographique la structure de domaine des disciplines scientifiques, et pour soutenir la recherche d'information et la classification. Un bref historique montre que la visualisation des domaines de connaissances s'enracine dans des disciplines telles que la scientometrie, la bibliometrie et l'analyse de citations, ainsi que la visualisation scientifique. L'A. analyse les principales etapes du processus de visualisation des domaines de connaissances : unites d'analyse, mesures, similarites entre unites. Differentes techniques couramment utilisees pour l'analyse et la visualisation des connaissances sont passees en revue : techniques de reduction de la dimensionnalite, analyse par clusters, configuration spatiale, visualisation et conception d'interaction. Differentes approches sont appliquees pour engendrer et comparer diverses representations cartographiques de la recherche sur la visualisation des domaines de connaissances. Ces cartes mettent en valeur les relations entre l'analyse de citations, la bibliometrie, la semantique et la visualisation de l'information. Augmenter l'accessibilite de la visualisation des domaines aupres des non-experts, appliquer la visualisation des domaines de connaissances pour mieux repondre a des questions pragmatiques, favoriser la collaboration et la diffusion des resultats entre chercheurs, developper des algorithmes plus robustes, comptent parmi les directions de recherche les plus prometteuses.

Co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately?

Abstract: In the past several years studies have started to appear comparing the accuracies of various science mapping approaches. These studies primarily compare the cluster solutions resulting from different similarity approaches, and give varying results. In this study we compare the accuracies of cluster solutions of a large corpus of 2,153,769 recent articles from the biomedical literature (2004–2008) using four similarity approaches: co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, direct citation, and a bibliographic coupling-based citation-text hybrid approach. Each of the four approaches can be considered a way to represent the research front in biomedicine, and each is able to successfully cluster over 92p of the corpus. Accuracies are compared using two metrics—within-cluster textual coherence as defined by the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and a concentration measure based on the grant-to-article linkages indexed in MEDLINE. Of the three pure citation-based approaches, bibliographic coupling slightly outperforms co-citation analysis using both accuracy measures; direct citation is the least accurate mapping approach by far. The hybrid approach improves upon the bibliographic coupling results in all respects. We consider the results of this study to be robust given the very large size of the corpus, and the specificity of the accuracy measures used. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Mapping the backbone of science

Abstract: This paper presents a new map representing the structure of all of science, based on journal articles, including both the natural and social sciences. Similar to cartographic maps of our world, the map of science provides a bird’s eye view of today’s scientific landscape. It can be used to visually identify major areas of science, their size, similarity, and interconnectedness. In order to be useful, the map needs to be accurate on a local and on a global scale. While our recent work has focused on the former aspect 1 , this

Mapping the backbone of science.

Abstract: This paper presents a new map representing the structure of all of science, based on journal articles, including both the natural and social sciences. Similar to cartographic maps of our world, the map of science provides a bird's eye view of today's scientific landscape. It can be used to visually identify major areas of science, their size, similarity, and interconnectedness. In order to be useful, the map needs to be accurate on a local and on a global scale. While our recent work has focused on the former aspect, this paper summarizes results on how to achieve structural accuracy. Eight alternative measures of journal similarity were applied to a data set of 7,121 journals covering over 1 million documents in the combined Science Citation and Social Science Citation Indexes. For each journal similarity measure we generated two-dimensional spatial layouts using the force-directed graph layout tool, VxOrd. Next, mutual information values were calculated for each graph at different clustering levels to give a measure of structural accuracy for each map. The best co-citation and inter-citation maps according to local and structural accuracy were selected and are presented and characterized. These two maps are compared to establish robustness. The inter-citation map is more » then used to examine linkages between disciplines. Biochemistry appears as the most interdisciplinary discipline in science. « less

Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping.

Abstract: We present VOSviewer, a freely available computer program that we have developed for constructing and viewing bibliometric maps. Unlike most computer programs that are used for bibliometric mapping, VOSviewer pays special attention to the graphical representation of bibliometric maps. The functionality of VOSviewer is especially useful for displaying large bibliometric maps in an easy-to-interpret way. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, an overview of VOSviewer’s functionality for displaying bibliometric maps is provided. In the second part, the technical implementation of specific parts of the program is discussed. Finally, in the third part, VOSviewer’s ability to handle large maps is demonstrated by using the program to construct and display a co-citation map of 5,000 major scientific journals.

A General Framework for Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis

Abstract: Gene co-expression networks are increasingly used to explore the system-level functionality of genes. The network construction is conceptually straightforward: nodes represent genes and nodes are connected if the corresponding genes are significantly co-expressed across appropriately chosen tissue samples. In reality, it is tricky to define the connections between the nodes in such networks. An important question is whether it is biologically meaningful to encode gene co-expression using binary information (connected=1, unconnected=0). We describe a general framework for ;soft' thresholding that assigns a connection weight to each gene pair. This leads us to define the notion of a weighted gene co-expression network. For soft thresholding we propose several adjacency functions that convert the co-expression measure to a connection weight. For determining the parameters of the adjacency function, we propose a biologically motivated criterion (referred to as the scale-free topology criterion). We generalize the following important network concepts to the case of weighted networks. First, we introduce several node connectivity measures and provide empirical evidence that they can be important for predicting the biological significance of a gene. Second, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that the ;weighted' topological overlap measure (used to define gene modules) leads to more cohesive modules than its ;unweighted' counterpart. Third, we generalize the clustering coefficient to weighted networks. Unlike the unweighted clustering coefficient, the weighted clustering coefficient is not inversely related to the connectivity. We provide a model that shows how an inverse relationship between clustering coefficient and connectivity arises from hard thresholding. We apply our methods to simulated data, a cancer microarray data set, and a yeast microarray data set.

The Self-Organizing Map

Abstract: An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature

Abstract: This article describes the latest development of a generic approach to detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. The work makes substantial theoretical and methodological contributions to progressive knowledge domain visualization. A specialty is conceptualized and visualized as a time-variant duality between two fundamental concepts in information science: research fronts and intellectual bases. A research front is defined as an emergent and transient grouping of concepts and underlying research issues. The intellectual base of a research front is its citation and co-citation footprint in scientific literature—an evolving network of scientific publications cited by research-front concepts. Kleinberg's (2002) burst-detection algorithm is adapted to identify emergent research-front concepts. Freeman's (1979) betweenness centrality metric is used to highlight potential pivotal points of paradigm shift over time. Two complementary visualization views are designed and implemented: cluster views and time-zone views. The contributions of the approach are that (a) the nature of an intellectual base is algorithmically and temporally identified by emergent research-front terms, (b) the value of a co-citation cluster is explicitly interpreted in terms of research-front concepts, and (c) visually prominent and algorithmically detected pivotal points substantially reduce the complexity of a visualized network. The modeling and visualization process is implemented in CiteSpace II, a Java application, and applied to the analysis of two research fields: mass extinction (1981–2004) and terrorism (1990–2003). Prominent trends and pivotal points in visualized networks were verified in collaboration with domain experts, who are the authors of pivotal-point articles. Practical implications of the work are discussed. A number of challenges and opportunities for future studies are identified. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.