Support for Comprehension of Invisible Specialty Based on Hierarchical Research Field Network

Abstract

In this paper, we tried to show covering domain “invisible specialty” of research fields by offering of the relations between papers in the field to novice researchers by proposed visualization method. We found it is not significantly different between experts and novices concerning the comprehension of actual covering domain of two academic journals in economics by a sorting test of published papers in each journal. Moreover, we confirmed that novices comprehend more clearly and consistently the covering domain of the fields by the developed information visualization system based on a hierarchical research field network.