Thirty-Two Years of IEEE VIS: Authors, Fields of Study and Citations

Hongtao Hao, Yumian Cui, Zhengxiang Wang, Yea-Seul Kim

View presentation:2022-10-20T19:12:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2022-10-20T19:12:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Fields of study at different levels in 3,240 VIS papers across the past 32 years. From L0 to L3, granularity increases. “Trend” indicates the proportion of papers falling into a field of study against the total number of papers published in that year. The highest proportion for each field of study is highlighted. “Total” indicates the total number of VIS publications falling into a field of study. One paper may contain more than one field of study at the same level, and one field of study may have multiple parent fields. For example, Pattern Recognition belongs to both Computer Science and Psychology.

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Abstract

The IEEE VIS Conference (VIS) recently rebranded itself as a unified conference and officially positioned itself within the discipline of Data Science. Driven by this movement, we investigated (1) who contributed to VIS, and (2) where VIS stands in the scientific world. We examined the authors and fields of study of 3,240 VIS publications in the past 32 years based on data collected from OpenAlex and IEEE Xplore, among other sources. We also examined the citation flows from referenced papers (i.e., those referenced in VIS) to VIS, and from VIS to citing papers (i.e., those citing VIS). We found that VIS has been becoming increasingly popular and collaborative. The number of publications, of unique authors, and of participating countries have been steadily growing. Both cross-country collaborations, and collaborations between educational and non-educational affiliations, namely “cross-type collaborations'', are increasing. The dominance of the US is decreasing, and authors from China are now an important part of VIS. In terms of author affiliation types, VIS is increasingly dominated by authors from universities. We found that the topics, inspirations, and influences of VIS research is limited such that (1) VIS, and their referenced and citing papers largely fall into the Computer Science domain, and (2) citations flow mostly between the same set of subfields within Computer Science. Our citation analyses showed that award-winning VIS papers had higher citations. Interactive visualizations, replication data, source code and supplementary material are available at https://32vis.hongtaoh.com and https://osf.io/zkvjm.