Visualization of Knowledge Structures

Tracking the growth of scientific knowledge has become increasingly challenging even in one’s own specialized field due to the vast amount of new scientific publications become available. As a rapidly advancing and expanding field of computing and information technology, information visualization has focused on the discovery of interrelationships among various scientific publications. However, visualizing intrinsic structures among documents in scientific literatures can only capture some aspects of scientific knowledge. For example, the number of citations received by a scientific work is a widely accepted hallmark of its significance. This chapter describes approaches to the visualization of knowledge structures with emphasis on the role of citation-based methods. Instead of relying upon occurrence patterns of content-bearing words, visualization of knowledge structures aims to capture perceived intellectual structures of a particular knowledge domain. An ultimate goal for the visualization of knowledge structures is to provide scientists with a tool that can detect the existence of a scientific paradigm and movements of such paradigms. This chapter also includes a summary of the history of tracking the growth of scientific knowledge. The state of the art is presented to highlight the trend of future research.