Academic Network Explorer: Making Sense of Your Research through Interaction

Literature reading is a necessary but never easy task for researchers, especially for beginners of academia or in time limited circumstances. To make sense of literature, researchers need not only to read papers, but also to understand their context such as the authors who wrote them, where they are published and what are their impact on certain research areas. I propose a visualization system to explore and make sense of local academic network. The system, which I call Academic Network Explorer (ANEX), allows users browse and explore multiple objects like papers and authors around a seed, and also understand the relationships between these objects. ANEX is implemented with modern web based technology using a dataset of million of academic papers and authors, but ANEX is also suitable for other scholarly dataset with the same kind of information.