Visualization of Publication Impact

Measuring scholarly impact has been a topic of much interest in recent years. While many use the citation count as a primary indicator of a publications impact, the quality and impact of those citations will vary. Additionally, it is often difficult to see where a paper sits among other papers in the same research area. Questions we wished to answer through this visualization were: is a publication cited less than publications in the field?; is a publication cited by high or low impact publications?; and can we visually compare the impact of publications across a result set? In this work we address the above questions through a new visualization of publication impact. Our technique has been applied to the visualization of citation information in INSPIREHEP (www.inspirehep.net), the largest high energy physics publication repository.