Visualizing Contextual Information of Cocitation Networks

Visualizing a cocitation network is an important technique employed by information scientists to illustrate the intellectual structure of a knowledge domain. A cocitation network is usually visualized by drawing an undirected arc between two articles that are cocited by other papers. The contextual information, i.e., information regarding papers citing these cocited articles, is suppressed and therefore invisible. We demonstrate a novel approach that uses the citation network itself to reveal cocitation relationships. The preserved contextual information of the cocitation network reveals the indirect relationships between clusters of cocited nodes that may facilitate the exploration of interdisciplinary studies.