Paperscape

by thewikinetsproject

WikiNets was and continues to be inspired by great visualisation tools, and more appear each day. Launched late last month, Paperscape puts together a map of the arXiv, an open, widely-used e-print repository for research papers in the mathematical and physical sciences.

In the map, each paper is represented by a circle, with the size of the circle proportional to the number of citations of the paper, and with papers placed in proximity to those they cite or have been cited by.

It’s striking how Paperscape puts together a vast amount of data — almost a million research papers — and allows a viewer to make use of all of it to quickly generate questions, hypotheses, and understanding of all this research. Each paper on the arXiv is tagged according to research field, and colouring nodes by these tags immediately highlights the most influential papers within each field, and shows their effects. It also gives an understanding of the relationship between different fields showing, for example, what might be considered a surprising amount of close interplay between quantitative finance and quantitative biology. Looking at a few papers on the boundary, however, this is quickly explained by the significance of understanding networks in both settings:

Highlighting the papers with ‘network’ in their title explains the link between quantitative finance and quantitative biology.

Networks, it seems, are good things to understand!

Interesting ideas flow freely. The differences in node sizes suggest differences between the ways mathematics and computer science papers and physics papers are cited. Colouring by age of paper highlights the significance of the latest round of LHC experiments, as well as the current buzz around superconductors and graphene. The most highly cited recent papers in quantum mechanics mainly concern entanglement, with citations often motivated by applications to quantum computation. And so on.

Likewise, we hope WikiNets will provide new perspectives on topics you know well, and give you a place to start from on topics you want to know well.