Real-time author co-citation mapping for online searching

Author searching is traditionally based on the matching of name strings. Special characteristics of authors as personal names and subject indicators are not considered. This makes it difficult to identify a set of related authors or to group authors by subjects in retrieval systems. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a prototype visualization system to enhance author searching. The system, called AuthorLink, is based on author co-citation analysis and visualization mapping algorithms such as Kohonen s feature maps and Pathfinder networks. AuthorLink produces interactive author maps in real time from a database of 1.26 million records supplied by the Institute for Scientific Information. The maps show subject groupings and more fine-grained intellectual connections among authors. Through the interactive interface the user can take advantage of such information to refine queries and retrieve documents through point-and-click manipulation of the authors names. 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.