Tracing Competing Paradigms - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 214

Fig. 6.11 Citation peaks of three clusters of articles indicate potential paradigms

To verify the major paradigms identified in our visualization and animation, we
located a topic written by Walter Alvarez, one of the leading figures in the impact
paradigm. Alvarez described in this topic the origin of the impact paradigm, its
development, and how the advances of the paradigm were driven by the search
of crucial evidence in detail in his topic (Alvarez 1997 ). We compared what our
visualization showed and what was described in the topic and found indeed a
substantial level of consistency between the two, especially regarding the KT impact
paradigm.
Henry Small in his longitudinal study of collagen research included a
questionnaire-based validation process (Small 1977 ). He sent questionnaires to
researchers in the field and asked them to describe major rapid changes of focus
in the subject domain. We are currently collecting comments in the form of
questionnaires to evaluate the groupings generated from co-citation patterns. We
are asking domain experts to identify their “nearest neighbors” in terms of research
specialties. The initial feedback revealed some insights into perceived specialties.
We will report the results in the near future.
The study of asteroids in mass extinctions has raised the question of now often it
can happen to the earth. According to NASA's estimation, about 80-90 % asteroids
approaching to the earth are not under any surveillance and some of them are
potentially catastrophic if the earth is in their trajectories. More telescopes should
turn to the sky and join the search. The topic of our next case study is not about the
search for asteroids, but something of a much wider impact at the galactic level -
the search for supermassive black holes.