CiteVis: Visualizing Citations among InfoVis Conference Papers

Team Members: Yiheng Qi, Arjun Srinivasan, Chad Stolper, John Stasko
Alumni: Jaegul Choo, Yi Han, Mengdie Hu, Ramik Sadana, Sahithya Baskaran, Alex Godwin, Neelima Sailaja, Anand Sainath, Hannah Pileggi

Run the System


    Citation datafile (txt) - Data driving the visualization (1995-2018)
    Notes file - Identifying issues and notes about the data
    Overview Video (22 MB mov)

    vispubdata.org: A Metadata Collection about IEEE Visualization (VIS) Publications - IEEE TVCG 2017
    CiteVis: Exploring Conference Paper Citation Data Visually (poster) - IEEE InfoVis 2013

Link to VIS 25 Special Edition

Citations are an important aspect of academic publications. When paper X cites paper Y, then Y presumably has been influential to the researchers who wrote X. As papers are cited more and more, they are considered to be more highly influential, important, and prestigious.

We have developed an interactive visualization system called CiteVis to present citation data about papers that have appeared at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) Conference from 1995 to 2018. Our system shows both the total number of Google Scholar citations that a paper has received and the specific InfoVis conference papers that have cited it. We gathered the data for this visualization in April 2019 and all numbers shown in the visualization are with respect to that time.

For each paper that appeared at the conference, we show the papers it cites as well as the papers citing it. We also indiciate the section of a paper containing the citation: introduction, related work, body, or nowhere. The visualization uses attribute-based layout and interaction to show the citations rather than a node-link network drawing. Additionally, viewers can search for papers from specific authors or organizations, about particular information visualization concepts, or with specific words in their title. The visualization also identifies the article receiving the Best Paper Award each year.

Some of the InfoVis papers proper do not appear in Google Scholar or are merged with another version of the paper. Also, extended versions of some of the papers were published in other venues and journals. We identify such issues in this CiteVis notes file.

Access the visualization here. Once the visualization is running, simply move the mouse pointer around the visualization and click on circles (papers) to explore the data. We also make the data driving this visualization available above.

Visualization Tutorial

Static depictions
  • Circles - Individual papers from each year
  • Circles' gray shade - Number of external (total) or internal (InfoVis) citations. Darker is more.
  • Yellow dot in circle - Best Paper Award winner.
     
    Mouse-over depictions
  • Yellow circle - Focus paper
  • Green circle - Papers the focus cites
  • Blue circle - Papers citing the focus
  • Letter in circle - Where citation occurs (i-intro, r-related work, b-body, n-nowhere)
     
    Mouse-click depictions
  • Yellow circle outline - Selected paper
  • Green circle outline - Papers the selection cites
  • Blue circle outline - Papers citing the selection
     
    Menu selections at top
  • Different colored box outlines - Papers of selected author, affiliation (organization), concept, or title word