FP-MimiYangBenjaminWang
Contents
Proposal
Group Members
- Mimi Yang
- Benjamin Wang
Description
The progress in scientific research is heavily dependent on the previous works of other scientists and engineers. Specifically individual fields within science and engineering emerge, grow and decline over time depending on a variety of factors. Publications of research in scientific journals is a strong indicator of the research interest for a specific topic. In most cases there is always a "seed" paper that starts a field or topic of investigation, leading to many other research projects that stem and reference the original first paper. Visualizations of paper genealogy have been completed in the past (https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/citeology), with global visualizations of entire databases also implemented(http://paperscape.org). However, none of these programs take into account how a specific fundamental research topics (ex. carbon nanotubes, graphene) first started and evolved to modern day applications. As such, we plan on building a way of visualizing how these important fundamental discoveries have impacted the landscape of modern science and engineering.
For this project, we will use the arXiv API to access recent publications concerning a keyword. The publications can be sorted by time, and the publication count over time shows us the temporal popularity of that keyword. We will also keep track of the popularity of the other keywords associated with the publications found from the original keyword. This search gives us the association relationship between keywords, allowing us to see what are "hot topics" in the area of the original key word. For a researcher, having the capability to track the topics being researched in a given scientific area is important in shaping that person's future directions of scientific inquiry. Most importantly, we are concerned with the newest developments in research in order to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. Many bibliometrics are concerned purely with the strength of connection between publications, professors, and keywords without an emphasis of what is happening now. Those tools are often skewed by the original research that instigated the whole field of study. This tool is a method to discover current research direction and future applications.
