CiteWiz: A Tool for the Visualization of Scientific Citation Networks

Rapport, 2004

The management of citation data for scientific articles is part of everyday life for a researcher. In this paper, we present CiteWiz, an extensible framework for visualization of scientific networks. The system is based on a taxonomy of citation database usage for researchers, and uses the Growing Polygons causality visualization technique, suitably modified to the context of citation data. Using this technique, hierarchies of articles with potentially very long citation chains can be graphically represented. The visualization is augmented with mechanisms for parent-child visualization, color assignment, as well as suitable interaction techniques for interacting with the view hierarchy and the individual articles in the dataset. Furthermore, the tool includes a static timeline visualization for overviewing the causality and importance of authors and articles in a citation database. Informal pilot studies with active researchers indicate that CiteWiz is useful for a wide range of scientific activities, and could well become a standard tool in their everyday work.