Visibility and visualisation of scholarly publications online: Erdős and beyond

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Developing and monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of interactive facilities and amount of data available about communities increases. It is possible to view connections on social and professional networks in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of academic papers. For example, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Academia.edu, now have large corpuses of freely available information on publications, together with author and citation details, that can be accessed and presented in a number of ways. In mathematical circles, the concept of the Erdős number has been introduced in honour of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, measuring the "collaborative distance" of a person away from Erdős through links by co-author. Similar metrics have been proposed in other fields. The possibility of exploring and improving the presentation of such links online in computer science and other fields will be presented as a means of improving the outreach and impact of publications by academics across different disciplines. Some practical guidance on what is worthwhile in presenting publication information online will be given. Note: The talk will be accessible for academics across different disciplines.

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Visibility and visualisation of

scholarly publications online:

Erdős and beyond

Prof. Jonathan P. Bowen

Birmingham City University Museophile Limited, UK

www.jpbowen.com

Introduction

• Mathematics, art, engineering,

computer science, software

engineering, museum informatics

• Academia: Imperial, Oxford, Reading, LSBU

• Visitor: UNU-IIST, KCL, Brunel, Westminster,

Waikato (New Zealand, 2011), Pratt Institute

(New York, USA, 2012)

• Industry: Logica, Silicon Graphics, Altran Praxis

• Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA London conference, 8–10 July 2014)

Overview

• Communities

• Visualization

• Publications

• Co-authorship

• Citations

• Online resources

– Google Scholar

– Microsoft Academic Search

– Academia.edu

Patterns

“The way is long if one

follows precepts, but short ...

If one follows patterns.”

– Seneca (c.4 BC – AD 65)

Community of Practice

• CoP: collection of people

developing domain knowledge

• Elements:

– Domain, common interest

– Community, willing to engage together

– Practice, developing new knowledge

• A brief introduction by Etienne Wenger,

2006: www.ewenger.com/theory

Cultivating a CoP

Different levels of

participation:

• Coordinator(s)

• Active

members

• Peripheral

members

• Outsiders

Bow tie effect

Visualization

Example – two communities

(arts and science)

Facebook

TouchGraph

connections

Garden party, OUCL, Keble Road, Oxford, July 1986

Oxford University Computing Laboratory

Tony Hoare Ali Abdallah

Jane & Alice

Bowen Jonathan Bowen

Theories of Programming and

Formal Methods

Shanghai, China, 1–3 September 2013

Festschrift for He Jifeng,

Shanghai, China Jonathan

Bowen

Zhiming

Liu

Google First webserver, 1999

– already in a museum!

Technology

Go

og

le S

ch

ola

r –

BC

U

htt

p:/

/sch

ola

r.g

oo

gle

.co

m

pu

blic

ation

s a

nd

cita

tio

ns

Google Scholar • http://scholar.google.com – publications & citations

• h-index (top h publications with h or more citations)

• i10-index (at least 10 citations)

h-index

Top h publications

with h or more

citations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

h-index

Top cited h papers with h or more citations.

i10-index

Papers with 10 (or n) or more citations.

Microsoft Academic Search • http://academic.research.microsoft.com

• Publications, citations, h-index

• g-index (top g with a total of at least g2 citations)

g-index

Top g with a

total of at least

g2 citations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-index

g-index

Top cited g papers with a total of at least g2 citations.

Top 30 co-

authors as

measured by

the number of

publications

Academic

Search

co-author

graph

Academic Search citation graph • Top 34 authors by number of citations

coauthors / citingauthors

Co-authors

and citing

authors.

Supervisors and

students

Alonzo Church

and Alan Turing

Academic

Search

genealogy

graph

See also

Mathematics

Genealogy

website

Alan Turing citations

Google Scholar

Small number of influential papers

– c. 5 citations per day

– few co-authors

Turing’s

top 1

0 p

apers

G

oogle

Schola

r

Theoretical computer science

Artificial Intelligence

Bioinformatics 1952

1948

Turing’s Worlds (centenary event)

Department of Continuing Education

University of Oxford, 23–24 June 2012

Happy Birthday Alan Turing!

(23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954)

Alan Turing – 2014

• 60th anniversary of Turing’s death

– 7 June 2014.

• Talk at BCS, London, on Thursday 5 June

2014. www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/52335

• See also Gresham College talk (2013): www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/alan-

turing-the-founder-of-computer-science

The Turing Guide

• Book due in 2015

• To be published by Oxford University Press

• Edited by Jonathan Bowen, Jack Copeland,

Mark Sprevak, and Robin Wilson

• c.40 chapters by contributors largely from

Oxford, Cambridge, Bletchley Park meetings

Ala

n T

uri

ng

warholize.me

The Erdős number

• Paul Erdős (1913–1996) – Hungarian mathematician

– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős

– Erdős number 0

– Co-authored over 1,000 publications

• 511 co-authors – Erdős number 1

– Co-authors of Erdős co-authors • Erdős number 2

• Etc.

ErdosNumber

Relationship of an author with Paul Erdos.

Academic

Search

co-author

path

Robin Wilson,

mathematician

and co-author,

Erdős number 1

Academia.edu

• Academic networking website

• Cf. LinkedIn (professional networking)

• Includes affiliation to university and

department

• Allows easy addition of books, papers,

answers, talks, teaching documents,

research interests, CV, status updates,

websites, etc.

• Add keywords for publication searching

• Monitoring of access statistics

Academia.edu home page

E.g., bcu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

Academia.edu statistics

E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

Academia.edu document accesses

Last 30 days

Academia.edu top documents

Last 30 days

Academia.edu country accesses

Last 30 days

Academia.edu

top country

accesses

Last 30 days

Non-free citations websites

• E.g., Web of Knowledge

• Thomson Reuters: http://wokinfo.com

• UK: http://wok.mimas.ac.uk

• OK if your university subscribes

• But not all do ...

Free publications websites • ACM Digital Library – CS professional body

• BibSonomy – social bookmark and

publication sharing system

• CiteSeerX – publications database

• DBLP – CS bibliography, individual effort

• Issuu – personal documents (PDF, ...)

• Mendeley – reference manager,

academic social network

• ResearchGate – for scientists, make your

work visible, 1.7 million members

• Researchr – find, collect, share, review

scientific publications

Summary

“A room without books is like

a body without a soul.”

– Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)

• Plethora of sites

• Check you profile on a selection

• Choose one or two effective ones

Research

“If we knew what it was we were

doing, it would not be called

research, would it?”

– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

Bust in

Birmingham

Museum and

Art Gallery

Blackboard in

the Museum of

the History of

Science, Oxford

(16 May 1931)

but ...

Administratium!

– William DeBuvitz, The Physics Teacher, 1989.

• Heaviest element

• Only neutrons, inert

• Impedes reactions

• 3-year half-life, then reorganisation

• Concentrates in large organisations

• Toxic at any level of concentration

Research

student advice

• “... at the end of my [PhD] first year [I] had nothing

to show as research results.”

• Supervised by David Wheeler at Cambridge: “Instead of fixing where you will start, decide where you

want to get to and work out how to get there.”

• Supervisor of Zhiming Liu at Leicester: Years later, I

often tried to assure my own PhD students that an

apparently wasted first year was necessary to create

the state of mind from which to outline work, set goals

and decide how they would be achieved.”

Digital Republic by

Mathai Joseph, 2013

Conclusion

Prof. Jonathan Bowen (FBCS, FRSA)

jonathan.bowen@bcu.ac.uk

www.jpbowen.com

• Google Scholar – visibility

• Academia.edu – virtual community

• Academic Search – visualisation