抄録
This paper proposes a visualization system for getting insight into future research activities from co-authorship networks. A bibliographic network such as a co-authorship network and a citation network is important information for researchers when doing a research survey. In particular, there are many requests on research survey that relate with researchers' future activities, such as identification of growing research areas as well as potential key persons. Although a citation network has received many attentions from researchers, it is not suitable for such surveys. Since collaboration of researchers is essential for researchers' activities, co-authorship network is suitable for predicting future activities. In order to get insights into future research activities by discriminating growing research areas from grown-up areas, the proposed visualization system provides the functions for identifying research areas and that for identifying time variation of both network structure and keyword distribution. As a basis for getting insights into future research activities, this paper focuses on the task of discriminating growing research areas from grown-up areas. In order to support the task, the proposed system is applied to the analysis of the co-authorship network used in the InfoVis 2004 Contest. The utility of the proposed system is verified through a case study, in which the same insights as found by the first place winner of the contest can be found by the combination of the proposed functions.
