The NSF has funded research that has recently culminated in a tool called the “Action Science Explorer”, a fascinating graph-visualization tool for scientific journal databases.

“While traditional search tools for scientific publication databases are still designed as single scrolling windows filled with text we believe that modern information visualization practices, including graphical user interfaces can produce breakthrough ideas,” he said. “The research team brings together skills in search, text analytics and visualization, all focused on searching large databases of scientific publications, so as to accelerate the processes of scientific research.”

A tool like this overlaid over databases like Citeseer would make finding relationships between papers and tracing references such much simpler. Hopefully this technology will be publicly available soon.

via A new visualization method makes research more organized and efficient.