Simplified Graph-based Visualization for Scientific Publication

Abstract

Understanding citations to scientific publications is a task of vital importance in the academic world. This task can be supported by appropriate data structures and visualization mechanisms. One challenge is the amount of existing relationships and the difficulty of determining which of the references of a document are considered the most potentially relevant to it. In this paper, we propose a simplified visualization of the relationships between scientific publications, in the form of a directed acyclic graph. From a given document, it is possible to visualize a path of references in which each step corresponds to the main citation of the previous one. A methodology is proposed in order to build this graph based in the opinion of the authors of scientific articles and an editorial board.