| Online bibliographic databases have become widely available and are important resources to scientific researchers. These databases store rich information and many evolve into digital libraries nowadays. Using a bibliographic database of a specific discipline, we can extract co-authorship and citation network of individual professionals. This allows for the study of patterns in scholarly contributions as well as for the exploration of scientific disputes associated with an individual's career. We have designed a visual-based tool, entitled PathWay, to discover and understand patterns and trends in the bibliographic data over a selected period of time. With PathWay, we conducted case studies on a physics bibliographic of approximately 400,000 scientists in physics over a 26 year time period. Our visualization design allows for effectively characterizing individual authorship career paths and for performing comparative studies that would be difficult to perform with prior search methods. Of particular interest is the visual tracking of the emergence and evolution of scientific disputes associated with publication. We outline here how the visualization functionality of PathWay provides for enhanced insight into the social process by which such disputes emerge and the career implications of such challenges. |
