Developing and monitoring communities has become increasingly easy on the web as the number of interactive facilities and amount of data available about communities increases. It is possible to view connections on social and professional networks in the form of mathematical graphs. It is also possible to visualise connections between authors of academic papers. For example, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Academia.edu, now have large corpuses of freely available information on publications, together with author and citation details, that can be accessed and presented in a number of ways. In mathematical circles, the concept of the Erdős number has been introduced in honour of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, measuring the "collaborative distance" of a person away from Erdős through links by co-author. Similar metrics have been proposed in other fields. The possibility of exploring and improving the presentation of such links online in computer science and other fields will be presented as a means of improving the outreach and impact of publications by academics across different disciplines. Some practical guidance on what is worthwhile in presenting publication information online will be given. Note: The talk will be accessible for academics across different disciplines.

1. Visibility and visualisation of
scholarly publications online:
Erdős and beyond
Prof. Jonathan P. Bowen
Birmingham City University
Museophile Limited, UK
www.jpbowen.com

2. Introduction
• Mathematics, art, engineering,
computer science, software
engineering, museum informatics
• Academia: Imperial, Oxford, Reading, LSBU
• Visitor: UNU-IIST, KCL, Brunel, Westminster,
Waikato (New Zealand, 2011), Pratt Institute
(New York, USA, 2012)
• Industry: Logica, Silicon Graphics, Altran Praxis
• Electronic Visualisation and the Arts
(EVA London conference, 8–10 July 2014)

3. Overview
• Communities
• Visualization
• Publications
• Co-authorship
• Citations
• Online resources
– Google Scholar
– Microsoft Academic Search
– Academia.edu

4. Patterns
“The way is long if one
follows precepts, but short ...
If one follows patterns.”
– Seneca (c.4 BC – AD 65)

5. Community of Practice
• CoP: collection of people
developing domain knowledge
• Elements:
–Domain, common interest
–Community, willing to engage together
–Practice, developing new knowledge
• A brief introduction by Etienne Wenger,
2006: www.ewenger.com/theory

6. Cultivating a CoP
Different levels of
participation:
• Coordinator(s)
• Active
members
• Peripheral
members
• Outsiders

7. Bow tie effect
Visualization
Example – two communities
(arts and science)
Facebook
TouchGraph
connections

8. Garden party, OUCL, Keble Road, Oxford, July 1986
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Tony Hoare Ali Abdallah
Jane & Alice
BowenJonathan Bowen

9. Theories of Programming and
Formal Methods
Shanghai, China, 1–3 September 2013
Festschrift for He Jifeng,
Shanghai, China
Jonathan
Bowen
Zhiming
Liu

10. Google
First webserver, 1999
– already in a museum!
Technology

11. GoogleScholar–BCU
http://scholar.google.com
publicationsandcitations

12. Google Scholar
• http://scholar.google.com – publications & citations
• h-index (top h publications with h or more citations)
• i10-index (at least 10 citations)

13. h-index
Top h publications
with h or more
citations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

14. h-index
Top cited h papers with h or more citations.

15. i10-index
Papers with 10 (or n) or more citations.

16. Microsoft Academic Search
• http://academic.research.microsoft.com
• Publications, citations, h-index
• g-index (top g with a total of at least g2 citations)

17. g-index
Top g with a
total of at least
g2 citations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-index

18. g-index
Top cited g papers with a total of at least g2 citations.

19. Top 30 co-
authors as
measured by
the number of
publications
Academic
Search
co-author
graph

20. Academic Search citation graph
• Top 34 authors by number of citations

21. coauthors / citingauthors
Co-authors
and citing
authors.

22. Supervisors and
students
Alonzo Church
and Alan Turing
Academic
Search
genealogy
graph
See also
Mathematics
Genealogy
website

23. Alan Turing citations
Google Scholar
Small number of influential papers
– c. 5 citations per day
– few co-authors

24. Turing’stop10papersGoogle
Scholar
Theoretical computer science
Artificial Intelligence
Bioinformatics 1952
1948

25. Turing’s Worlds (centenary event)
Department of Continuing Education
University of Oxford, 23–24 June 2012

26. Happy Birthday Alan Turing!
(23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954)

27. Alan Turing – 2014
• 60th anniversary of Turing’s death
– 7 June 2014.
• Talk at BCS, London, on Thursday 5 June
2014. www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/52335
• See also Gresham College talk (2013):
www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/alan-
turing-the-founder-of-computer-science

28. The Turing Guide
• Book due in 2015
• To be published by Oxford University Press
• Edited by Jonathan Bowen, Jack Copeland,
Mark Sprevak, and Robin Wilson
• c.40 chapters by contributors largely from
Oxford, Cambridge, Bletchley Park meetings

29. AlanTuring
warholize.me

30. The Erdős number
• Paul Erdős (1913–1996)
– Hungarian mathematician
– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős
– Erdős number 0
– Co-authored over 1,000 publications
• 511 co-authors
– Erdős number 1
– Co-authors of Erdős co-authors
• Erdős number 2
• Etc.

31. ErdosNumber
Relationship of an author with Paul Erdos.

32. Academic
Search
co-author
path
Robin Wilson,
mathematician
and co-author,
Erdős number 1

33. Academia.edu
• Academic networking website
• Cf. LinkedIn (professional networking)
• Includes affiliation to university and
department
• Allows easy addition of books, papers,
answers, talks, teaching documents,
research interests, CV, status updates,
websites, etc.
• Add keywords for publication searching
• Monitoring of access statistics

34. Academia.edu home page
E.g., bcu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

35. Academia.edu statistics
E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

36. Academia.edu document accesses
Last 30 days

37. Academia.edu top documents
Last 30 days

38. Academia.edu country accesses
Last 30 days

39. Academia.edu
top country
accesses
Last 30 days

40. Non-free citations websites
• E.g., Web of Knowledge
• Thomson Reuters: http://wokinfo.com
• UK: http://wok.mimas.ac.uk
• OK if your university subscribes
• But not all do ...

41. Free publications websites
• ACM Digital Library – CS professional body
• BibSonomy – social bookmark and
publication sharing system
• CiteSeerX – publications database
• DBLP – CS bibliography, individual effort
• Issuu – personal documents (PDF, ...)
• Mendeley – reference manager,
academic social network
• ResearchGate – for scientists, make your
work visible, 1.7 million members
• Researchr – find, collect, share, review
scientific publications

42. Summary
“A room without books is like
a body without a soul.”
– Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
• Plethora of sites
• Check you profile on a selection
• Choose one or two effective ones

43. Research
“If we knew what it was we were
doing, it would not be called
research, would it?”
– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Bust in
Birmingham
Museum and
Art Gallery
Blackboard in
the Museum of
the History of
Science, Oxford
(16 May 1931)

44. but ...
Administratium!
– William DeBuvitz, The Physics Teacher, 1989.
• Heaviest element
• Only neutrons, inert
• Impedes reactions
• 3-year half-life, then reorganisation
• Concentrates in large organisations
• Toxic at any level of concentration

45. Research
student advice
• “... at the end of my [PhD] first year [I] had nothing
to show as research results.”
• Supervised by David Wheeler at Cambridge:
“Instead of fixing where you will start, decide where you
want to get to and work out how to get there.”
• Supervisor of Zhiming Liu at Leicester: Years later, I
often tried to assure my own PhD students that an
apparently wasted first year was necessary to create
the state of mind from which to outline work, set goals
and decide how they would be achieved.”
Digital Republic by
Mathai Joseph, 2013

46. Conclusion
Prof. Jonathan Bowen
(FBCS, FRSA)
jonathan.bowen@bcu.ac.uk
www.jpbowen.com
• Google Scholar – visibility
• Academia.edu – virtual community
• Academic Search – visualisation