Academic research on data visualization has seen an explosive growth in the last 15 years. In this presentation I use Elsevier's Scopus to search for scholarly research on data visualization and to present visual summaries of the vast literature.

1. Visualizing Data Visualization
February 2017
Keiko Ono, Ph.D.
1

2. Two largest databases of academic literature.
In this presentation I use Elsevier’s Sciverse
Scopus.
2

3. Using “data visualization” (with quotation marks) as search term in title,
abstract or keywords produces over 20,000 results.
3

4. That’s a lot of information. To narrow the scope and find what
we’re really looking for, we could use additional search terms.
But sometimes we want to understand, make sense of the
really big body of literature (in this case n=20,262)
In Scopus there’s a default built-in “Analyze Results” function
that allows visual summary of the bibliometric data.
For each, there’s a frequency table too, so one can create own
graphics.
4

5. One can use “Analyze results” function to see how (1) the # of
citations have changed over the years…
Until 1987, the number
of citations per year was
single digit. It reached
133 in 1996 and 1,168 in
2007. In 2016, there were
2,217 scholarly
publications on data
visualization!
5

6. Or to see (2) which journals have published the greatest
number of articles on this topic…
6
No.1. on the list
is Lecture
Notes in
Computer
Science
(including
Subseries
Lecture Notes
in Artificial
Intelligence and
Lecture Notes
in
Bioinformatics)

7. Or to see (3) who the leading authors are on this topic.
7

8. And (4) where they are affiliated.
8
The leaders in data
visualization
research are U of
California Davis,
Georgia Institute of
Technology, U of
Utah…and so on.
University of Tokyo is
ranked #18.

9. And to see (5) how countries compare…
9

10. (6) Scopus also visually presents the document type
breakdown
10

11. (7) And by subject area
11
Not clear how
these
percentages are
calculated…??

12. In summary, research on data visualization has
seen an explosive growth in the 21st century. The
leading fields of research are computer science,
engineering, and mathematics. The United States
is the leader in this area of research, followed by
China, Germany and UK.
Alternatively, using “infographics” as seach term
produces far fewer results (only about 200).
12