Exploring the author graph - Basic operations

Click the “Author Graph” tab to open the author graph.

You can manipulate the graph in various ways:

Zooming and scrolling

Use the mouse or the controls on the left, to zoom in/out and navigate around the graph.

Toggle “Snowflakes” Visibility

By clicking the “Snowflakes” button you can hide groups of authors that contribute only a single article each, to the investigation. This usually simplifies the graph considerably and thus improves performance and visibility, without losing the main “players” in the field.

Graph layout

You can switch between different graph layout options using the “select layout” button.

Node size

Node size can represent either the number of publications the author contributed to this investigation, or the relevance of authors publications to the topic of investigation. Use the “Size by” selector to switch between the two options.

Node color

Authors are colored by the region of their most recent known affiliation (based on the documents currently available in the investigation).

Selecting authors

Click on a node in the graph to select it. Use the ctrl/shift keys for multiple selection.

Apart from these basic selection capabilities, you can select all co-authors of a selected author(s), or the entire cluster of authors, by clicking the “select All Co-authors” or “Select All Connected Authors” options from the node right-click menu.

You can find the shortest path(s) between any two selected authors. Right-click on one of the selected nodes and click on “Find Shortest Path”. One or more paths with minimal length are highlighted. You can now click authors on this path to learn more about them.

To deselect all selected nodes, simply click on an empty area in the graph.

Filtering the graph

You can use the filters on the right to filter the graph. Note that the filters are applied to the documents, not the authors. This means that apart from the authors that match the filters, their co-authors will also be presented in the graph.

A powerful option is the free text filter - only authors of articles that contain the search string will be displayed.

Removing authors from the graph

You can “clean up” the graph by removing all selected/unselected nodes. This may be useful if the graph contains large clusters of completely irrelevant authors, for example, “duplicated” authors with a name identical to the one you are interested in.

You can always bring back the removed nodes, using the “Bring back all removed authors” option from the investigation setting menu.

Locating a specific author in the graph by name

Type a name (or a part of a name) in the “highlight” box and press Enter.

Socrates will highlight all matching authors with animated circles. The number of matches is indicated on the right side of the highlight box. Use the up/down arrows to focus on each matching author at a time.