Now this is a kick ass product

The folks at Biomedexperts appear to have it figured out. Especially with regard to author mapping.

BiomedExperts provides you with an exciting new view into the world of biomedical research. The literature network represents more than 1.4 million scientist profiles. Included are all people who have authored at least three articles in the last 10 years that appear in the Pubmed ® database.

If you are like me and haven’t yet published anything yet, you can search & find an expert and look at their network. So i tried it out. I search for my namesake Krishnan, S and found his profile

Krishnan's Profile

Each tab above is pretty self explanatory. I particularly like the NetworkView and GeoNetworkview tab. Clicking on them gives your this

NetworkView

Krishnan's network view

Notice the arrows with the numbers that i inserted into this snapshot.

#1. Shows the link between Krishnan, S and his co-authors.

#2. Is a listing of all the authors in his network, both primary and secondary network. i.e. people who are linked to his people.

#3.The authors in his extended or secondary network. (I should’ve probably switched this with #2). Clicking on any of the authors, primary or secondary, will make them the center of the circle and you see their network.

#4. (At the very top) Brilliant!! These let you narrow down the map (number of lines) based on that criteria. I’m not sure I fully understand the criteria but that’s for people way smarter than me.

#5. If you hover over that view, you will get an overview of author – research area, pubyrs, publication listing, etc. Love it!!

There certainly are some quirk that i don’t understand yet. Like for example, clicking on just the linking lines rotates the map. I’m not sure why it does that.

Now the next part and my favorite of the two –

GeoNetworkView

Krishnan's GeoNetworkView

Green is where Krishnan has publications
Red is where his co-authors have publications

Click on any colored square to get a listing of publication by his co-authors. You can then click on those names to get into their profile.

There are several other features to this site but you have to try it out and have fun.

Concept mapping and author mapping by Dr. Xia Lin

I have been researching the possibility of linking authors to their co-authors and creating a visual network structure that can be traversed. It will will help users discover author linkages that they were not aware of or potential collaborator for their research. OR maybe find articles that may be of interest.

I happened to run into this article written on ScienceDirect by Dr.Xia Lin. Brilliant piece of research work but its still a lot to digest for a lesser being like me. I managed to find Dr. Xia Lin’s profile at Drexel university and chanced upon these amazing set of findings. The projects linked to here give me a lot more information in 30 minutes of playing around, than reading a 20 page article.

This is further evidence to my theory that prototyping an idea is worth more than several hours of discussion and documentation trying to explain it in words.

Research Projects

Starting from my dissertation, I have devoted enormous amounts of hours in developing research prototypes as a part of my research outcome. Most of the prototypes are Web-based applications for real world problems. They are all related to the central question of my research: how to apply the advanced information technology to facilitate human information seeking in the digital environment. These prototypes provide some answers to the question. (1) Information must be made visible to information seekers. (2) Association of information should be derived and presented to information seekers for effective retrieval. (3) People and computers must work collaboratively (not just interactively as supported by current information systems).

Explore these prototypes and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Current Projects:

• AuthorMap — Instant auothor co-citation maps for interactive retrieval
• Visual Concept Explorer — A semantic mapping tool for concept exploration and visual searching
• PNASLink: — A journal mapping prototype for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA (Award winning submission to INFOVIS’2004).
• What’s New — Exploratory PubMed Search Interface
• Digital Museum — 3D panorama view of the physical collections of historic costumes housed at Drexel University

Previous Projects:

• Knowledge Class — A Web-based customization tool for knowledge organization
• Visual MeSH — A Java RMI application to provide visual interaction with Medical concepts in MetaThesaurus and MEDLINE.
• MEDLINE Search Assistant — searches using drag and drop techniques.

Visual Sitemap — Automatically generated site maps for web sites or link collections