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The Autodesk Research team has just published “Citeology” on their website.  It’s a java applet for visualizing a large collection of technical research papers.  As you can see from the image above, the end result combines both the text of the papers along with a timeline and information on a chosen topic and where it appears within.

Citeology looks at the relationship between research publications through their use of citations. The names of each of the 3,502 papers published at the CHI and UIST Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conferences between 1982 and 2010 are listed by year and sorted with the most cited papers in the middle. In total, 11,699 citations were made from one article to another within this collection. These citations are represented by the curved lines in the graphic, linking each paper to those that it referenced.

I’m surprised to see this coming from Autodesk Research, not what I would typically expect from them.  Nonetheless it’s an impressive visualization that’s both beautiful and functional.

via Citeology – Projects – Autodesk Research.