Changing topic bias in biomedical science maps by linking documents through alternative data sources: policy documents, patents, authors, Facebook, and Twitter

Abstract

Traditional science maps visualize topics by clustering documents within a network, but they are inherently biased toward clustering certain topics over others. If these topics could be chosen, then the science maps could be tailored for different needs. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the topic bias of a science map can be changed by choosing different data sources to build the document network. We analyze this by evaluating the clustering effectiveness of several topic categories over two sources that are traditionally used for the creation of science maps (citations and text similarity) and six non-traditional data sources, which we found favor different kinds of topics: Health issues for Facebook users, biotechnology topics for patent families, government and social issues for policy documents, food topics for Twitter conversations, nursing topics for Twitter users, and geographical entities for document authors (the favoring in this latter source was particularly strong). Our results show that diverse data sources can be used to control topic bias, which opens up the possibility of creating science maps tailored for different needs.