About this application

This application will construct a graph showing authors from the Australian Government Antarctic Division's publications database. Authors are linked if they have co-authored at least one paper. The resultant graph can be used to explore the nature of scientific collaboration within Australia's Antarctic program.

Using the graph:

• Double-click on any node to make that the focus of the graph
• The graph will show only those nodes near to the focus node. Use the Locality slider to make more of the graph visible
• You can search for a specific person (surname) using the search function

Caveats:

• You will need to have the Flash player installed
• It is only possible to identify authors by surname and first initial, so Smith, J.D. and Smith, J.Q. will be treated as the same person. This is largely a limitation of the publications database itself.

This application can also be used to create a collaboration network from user-supplied publication data. The data needs to be in a comma-separated file with exactly three columns. Each row must look like this: publication_identifier, author_name, publication_category. The publication_identifier may be a number or the publication title (provided that titles are unique). The publication_category will be used to colour the nodes, and can be used (for example) to differentiate publications coming from different research groups. All text should be quoted. An example file might contain:

"Title 1", "Smith J", "Research group 1"
"Title 1", "Jones H", "Research group 1"
"Title 2", "Smith Q", "Research group 2"