Egocentric visual analysis of dynamic citation network

Egocentric citation network visualization focuses on the citation relationship around a specific node, which can help gain insights into citation patterns clearly. Previous techniques can effectively analyze the whole citation network at a single level, but cannot gain the temporal citation patterns of a specific field at different levels and especially analyze the authors that have promoting influence on the citation relationships, which causes the incomprehensive perspective on understanding the citation relationships. In this paper, we design and implement a novel egocentric visual analysis system of citation network. In order to perform multiple-level analysis for the citation relationships between a specific field and other fields, we construct a new hierarchical egocentric network. Based on the vivid pollen-spread metaphors which can interpret the constructed network impressively, the citation relationship is similar to the “pollen spread” between “flowers,” and each author that has promoting influence on the citation relationships plays a role of “bee.” We provide abundant visualizations and interactions by these metaphors, which can effectively obtain the temporal patterns of the citation network. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our system through case studies and user study. Graphical Abstract