Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff
Project (B)
SS 2018

Visualizing Author Relationships in DBLP and PubMed

Academic papers are published in journals with both a list of authors and a list of references. There are databases of publication meta data that are often specific for particular research areas. For example, PubMed indexes biomedical research, DBLP indexes computer science research. In this project we will be exploring how to visualize author relationships in both databases. This will involve working with a graph database and many available libraries for the programming language Python. Can you see which journals an author usually publishes in? Who do people publish with? Can you identify publishing cartels? What authors are highly connected? Can you calculate Erdös-number-like metrics for computer scientists using DBLP? How much self-citation is there? There are many questions that could be answered using visualization techniques, and many challenges to deal with. Authors change names, their names are spelled differently, they are in different institutions, the metadata may be wrong or broken. How can you build a system that is resilliant to such problems? Are there other resources you could use to solve some of these problems? We will find out!