Understanding research trends in conferences using paperLens

PaperLens is a novel visualization that reveals trends, connections, and activity throughout a conference community. It tightly couples views across papers, authors, and references. PaperLens was developed to visualize 8 years (1995-2002) of InfoVis conference proceedings and was then extended to visualize 23 years (1982-2004) of the CHI conference proceedings. This paper describes how we analyzed the data and designed PaperLens. We also describe a user study to focus our redesign efforts along with the design changes we made to address usability issues. We summarize lessons learned in the process of design and scaling up to the larger set of CHI conference papers.