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ABOUT

Scientific conferences and journals play a crucial role by promoting the cross-pollination of ideas and technologies, fostering new collaborations, shaping scientific communities, and connecting research efforts from academia and industry. However, bibliometric systems and academic search engines provide a limited support for analysing scientific venues in similar fields, and to analyse the involvement of industrial sectors. This led to the creation of the AIDA Dashboard, an innovative tool for exploring and making sense of scientific venues which integrates statistical analysis, semantic technologies, and visual analytics.

How to Use

The AIDA Dashboard allows the users to analyze different entities in Computer Science: conferences, journals and research areas.

Conferences and journals can be searched through their name or their acronym using the search bar in the middle of the home page. Then, the system will automatically suggest the closest matches. When searching, the dashboard prompts also research areas, e.g., The Web. Clicking on one of the suggested items the system will redirect users to either the venue panel (for conferences and journals) or advanced search panel (for topics).

The venue panel (e.g., International Semantic Web Conference) is organized in different sections:

  • Overview tab is the introductory page of a venue, where the user is first redirected. It provides general information about the venue performance and trends. This page is organized in two sections. The bar on the left gives information and metrics (e.g., the period of activity, the total number of publications and citations, the h5-index) about the underlying venue. It also provides general information about the average h-index of the organizations and authors who published in the venue as well as the average citations received by the published papers. In the lower part, it reports the focus areas and the rank of the venue in each of them (according to the average citations in the last 5 years). The section on the right provides several charts about the number of publications and citations over the years, the main authors and organizations in terms of publications (in the last 10 years), and the top fingerprint topics in terms of publications and citations (in the last 10 years).
  • Citation Analysis tab reports the evolution in time of several citation-based metrics such as the impact factor and the average citations for paper. It also shows the evolution of the rank and the percentile of the venue in the focus areas.
  • Organizations tab shows several analytics about the main institutions active in the venue. In this section the users can assess the main organizations according to their number of publications, citations, and average citation. Organizations can also be filtered according to their types (academia, industry, or all). The default interface used by the dashboard for reporting these data is a bar chart in which each item is associated with the total of the metric in a period (e.g., last five years). The user can also change this view (using the `time-based' button) to a line-chart showing the same data across the years, which allows users to easily analyze trends in time.
  • Countries tab allows the users to analyze the contribution of specific countries. The user can switch between the Chart view and the Map view. The first one shows the set of countries according to their number of publications, citations, and average citations. The second view arranges the information about the frequency of articles by country in a world map.
  • Topics tab allows users to analyze the topic trends over time. Specifically, it shows two selections of topics: main topics and fingerprint topics.
  • Authors tab uses the same interface for displaying the main researchers associated with their number of publications, citations, and average citations. The researchers can also be sorted by their overall H-index and H5-index, in order to quickly identify high impact researchers.
  • Related Conferences/Journals tab allows users to compare the underlying venue against all the others in the same fields according to their number of publications, citations, and average citations for paper. The user can contextualise the comparison to different fields clicking on other focus areas present in the contextualised tab menu.
  • Industry tab reports the number of publications and citations from academia, industry, and collaborative efforts as well as the industrial sectors analysis. The latter shows the percentage of produced publications and citations received by companies in different industrial sectors.

The advanced search panel (e.g., Semantic Web) allows users to browse and compare venues according to their fields. The user can browse the different fields using the selection menus and switch between journals and conferences with the button in the upper right. Journals and conferences can be ranked according several metrics, including:

  • average citations received in the last five years,
  • average articles published in the last 5 years,
  • h5-index,
  • the average h5-index of the relevant organisations,
  • the average h5-index of the relevant authors.

The last two metrics are not typically offered by alternative systems, but are very useful to identify emergent venues that are attracting strong research groups but may not have yet received a good number of citations.

Metrics

Here we list the different metrics displayed in the different tabs that we derived from citations.

Citation Analysis Tab

  • Left chart:

    • Blue bars $$average\_citation_y = \frac{Citations_y}{|Publications_y|}$$ where Publicationsy is the number of published papers at the venue in the year y, and Citationsy is the number of citations received by those papers the same year.

    • Black line $$impact\_factor_y = \frac{Citations_y}{Publications_{y-1} + {Publications_{y-2}}}$$ It is important to mention that Citationsy are only the citations received in the year y by the publications written in the years (y−1) and (y−2).

  • Right chart:

    This chart displays how the venue is ranked in each focus area over time. To attain this, for each focus area we computed the average citation value, as: rank(venue)y = Position(venue,focus_area)y which determines the position of the venue among all the venues classified in the same focus_area in the year y. This representation can be view in rank view (absolute rank) or in a percentile view, which say in which percentile the venue was placed in the year y.

Organization/Countries/Authors/Compare/Industry Tab

Overview

  • All Citations: $$∑Citations_{tf}$$ is the summation of all the citations received in the selected time frame tf (e.g. last 5 year).

  • AVERAGE Citations: $$average\_citations_{tf} = \frac{Citations_{tf}}{Publications_{tf}}$$ where Publicationstf and Citationstf represent the total number of publications and citations received in the selected time frame tf (e.g. last 5 years).

Time based

  • All Citations:

    Counts the yearly citations $$∑Citations_y(venue)$$ where y is an year. For instance, with Citations2021(venue) we identify the overall number of papers written in 2021 citing papers published at the venue in previous years.

  • AVERAGE Citations: $$average\_citations_{y} = \frac{\sum{Citations_{y}}}{Publications_{y}}$$ which computes the average number of citations received by papers written in a year y. For example, to compute the average citations in 2019, we first retrieve all the papers written in 2019 at the venue. Then, we count all the citations received by those papers and finally, we divide it by the number of articles.

TEAM

The AIDA Dashboard has been developed in collaboration between the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI) of the University of Cagliari, the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the Open University, and Springer Nature.