Leydesdorff on citation impact visualizations

Peter Suber brought this article to my attention (and it's available in pdf AND html :)

Although Leydesdorff's approach is limited by his choice to aggregate citations by journals instead of individual articles, I liked his symbolic manipulation of the shape of each node--stretching them vertically or horizontally--to denote additional
information about the journals themselves.

--jon

Leydesdorff, Loet (2005) Visualization of the Citation Impact Environments of Scientific Journals: An online mapping exercise. In Proceedings Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Pasadena, California.

http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/992/

Abstract

Aggregated journal-journal citation networks based on the Journal Citation Reports 2004 of the Science Citation Index (5968 journals) and the Social Science Citation Index (1712 journals) are made accessible from the perspective of any of these
journals. A vectorspace model is used for normalization, and the results are brought online at http://www.leydesdorff.net/jcr04 as input-files for the visualization program Pajek. The user is thus able to analyze the citation environment in terms of
links and graphs. Furthermore, the local impact of a journal is defined as its share of the total citations in the specific journal’s citation environments; the vertical size of the nodes is varied proportionally to this citation impact. The
horizontal size of each node can be used to provide the same information after correction for within-journal (self-)citations. In the “citing” environment, the equivalents of this measure can be considered as a citation activity index which maps how
the relevant journal environment is perceived by the collective of authors of a given journal. As a policy application, the mechanism of interdisciplinary developments among the sciences is elaborated for the case of nanotechnology journals.