Finally, the results of a coop­er­a­tion with the guys from eigen­fac­tor are online!

For the impa­tient: here’s the direct link: http://well-formed.eigenfactor.org

The site fea­tures 4 dif­fer­ent visu­al­iza­tions, try­ing dif­fer­ent approaches to map­ping infor­ma­tion flow and cita­tion struc­ture in the sciences.

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Some inter­est­ing work from the Bergstrom Lab at the depart­ment of Biol­ogy(!), Uni­ver­sity of Washington.

(PDF ver­sion here, more info here)

Based on cita­tion pat­terns, they cal­cu­lated an infor­ma­tion flow model of how sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines are influ­enc­ing each other. While I can­not fol­low all the tech­ni­cal details, I really appre­ci­ate the well-designed dia­grams. Quite inter­est­ing to see an “a pos­te­ri­ori” order of sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines based on the actual flow of information!

An expla­na­tion of the dia­grams from the eigenfactor.org:

Orange cir­cles rep­re­sent fields, with larger, darker cir­cles indi­cat­ing larger field size as mea­sured by eigen­fac­tor. Blue arrows rep­re­sent cita­tion flow between fields. An arrow from field A to field B indi­cates cita­tion traf­fic from A to B, with larger, darker arrows indi­cat­ing higher cita­tion vol­ume. The map was cre­at­ing using our infor­ma­tion flow method for map­ping large net­works. Using data from Thom­son Scientific’s 2004 Jour­nal Cita­tion Reports (JCR), we par­ti­tioned 6128 jour­nals con­nected by 6,434,916 cita­tions into 88 mod­ules. For visual sim­pl­city, we show only the most impor­tant links, namely those that a ran­dom surfer tra­verses at least once in 5000 steps, and the mod­ules that are con­nected by these links.

There is also an inter­ac­tive ver­sion online based on my good old Rela­tion Browser. But hon­estly, I think the dia­grams work much better.

Over­all a great exam­ple of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research, where pre­sen­ta­tion and infor­ma­tion design play together nicely with interesting+relevant analy­sis – exemplary!