Abstract

This longitudinal study of the development of Spain’s ISI scientific domain examines three key time periods: 1990-1995, 1996-2000 and 2001-2005, with the goal of describing the basic structure and backbone of Spanish research, as well as studying its development over time. To this end, ISI categories are used as units of analysis, co-citation as units of measure, and pruning algorithms to simplify the relationship between categories in the visualizations. The results show that from the macrostructure point of view, biomedicine and materials science research provide the basic nucleus at first. Over the years this nucleus is consolidated and expanded with agricultural and soil sciences research. From the microstructure perspective, an increase is observed in the number of interdisciplinary categories, which occupy central positions, indicating increased interaction between disciplines that have traditionally been more important or visible and those on the periphery, or less well known.

Abstract

The animation of network visualizations poses technical and theoretical challenges. Rather stable patterns are required before the mental map enables a user to make inferences over time. In order to enhance stability, we developed an extension of stress minimization with developments over time. This dynamic layouter is no longer based on linear interpolation between independent static visualizations, but change over time is used as a parameter in the optimization. Because of our focus on structural change versus stability the attention is shifted from the relational graph to the latent eigenvectors of matrices. The approach is illustrated with animations for the journal citation environments of Social networks, the (co)author networks in the carrying community of this journal, and the topical development using relations among its title words. Our results are also compared with animations based on PajekToSVGAnim and SoNIA.