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Fig. 8.23 An interactive science overlay map of Glaxo-SmithKline's publications between 2000
and 2009. The red circles are GSK's publications in clinical medicine (as moving mouse-over the
Clinical Medicine label) (Reprinted from Rafols et al. 2010 with permission, available at http://idr.
gatech.edu/usermapsdetail.php?id=61 )
an overlay. The strength of this overlay approach is that one can easily identify the
activity of an institution with references spreading over multiple disciplinary regions
as well as an institution with a much focused discipline.
The flexibility of the science overlay maps has been demonstrated in studies
of interdisciplinarity of fields over time (Porter and Rafols 2009 ), comparing
departments, universities and R&D bases of large corporations (Rafols et al. 2010 ),
and tracing the diffusion of research topics over science (Leydesdorff and Rafols
2011 ). Figure 8.24 shows a more recent base map generated by Loet Leydesdorff in
VOSViewer.
8.4.3
Dual-Map Overlays
Many citation maps are designed to show either the sources or the targets of citations
in a single display but not both. The primary reason is that a representation with
a mixed of citing and cited articles may considerably increase the complexity of
its structure and dynamics. There doesn't seem to be a clear gain if we combine
them together in a single view. Although it is conceivable that a combined structure
may be desirable in situations such as a heated debate, researchers are in general
more concerned with differentiating various arguments before considering how to
combine them.
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