Tell Me Who Your Friends Are and I'll Tell You Who You Are: Studying the Evolution of Collaborations in Research Environments

Nowadays, many tools and systems are available to allow the analysis and the comparison of researchers' scientific production. The reason underlying such interest is evident: promotions, funding allocations, and employments are currently based on the evaluation (and direct comparisons) of publication lists. Existing measures, like H-index, aim at supporting this process by automatic calculations of quality and/or quantity indices. In this work, we propose a demonstration of a web environment, available at http://d-index.di.unito.it, that faces the problem of studying the impact of collaborations in research communities. The presented system allows the estimation of the impact of each scientific collaboration on the production of each researchers indexed by the DBLP bibliographic database by means of a novel time-based modeling of collaborative environments. The proposed application provides several interactions and visualization schemes to deeply discover clear and latent insights, over time, around the work of each researcher. Furthermore, it allows cross-community rankings of the authors depending on similar collaboration patterns and dependences.