ConfVisExplorer: a literature-based visual analysis system for conference comparison

Given a research field, there are usually multiple conferences with different sizes and characteristics, and not all researchers have equal participations in all those conferences. For a conference organizer, knowing the level of involvements by the researchers in the field will allow them to put effort into broadening the participation and enrich the research scope. For researchers, knowing the different strengths and focuses of those conferences also allows them to enhance the effectiveness of their effort and the visibility of their works. In recent years, analyzing scientific literature by visualization has become a popular topic, but most of them focus only on the overall characteristics of publications such as authors, citations, and topics. This study focuses on the analysis and comparisons of academic conferences. In this paper, we present the Conference Orange, a new visual metaphor for analyzing and comparing the characteristics of multiple conferences. First, we propose an assessment framework to describe the maturity of the conferences. Second, we map the metrics in the framework to different diagrams for visual analysis and comparison. Third, we design and implement ConfVisExplorer, a multi-view interactive visual system that combines these diagrams, which helps users to explore the structure of the conferences and the attributes in context, such as authors and institutions. Finally, we conduct case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system. Graphic abstract