An Immersive Approach for Scholar Profile Visualization

Interactive visualizations can help users to find researchers and their research profiles contributing to the challenge of information overload due to the increasing number of published articles. Previous studies using bibliographical data on scholars and their articles have focused primarily on 2D visualizations, especially those displaying topics of researcher expertise. Alternatively, our work contributed to a 3D visualization framework for scholars rather than articles based on published research using Virtual Reality (VR) to create an immersive user experience. Procedures in the framework include collecting Scopus article metadata to generate subject domains, mapping articles-domains to identify scholars' research expertise, transforming scholar data points, and building the visualization inside the virtual environment. The creation of subject domains and the labeling process of Scholar metadata utilizes Scopus metadata originating from Scopus subject area. After labeling the article metadata, the transformation process that employed both metadata of Scopus and Scholar led to researcher coordinates for a scatter diagram panel in the VR space. Those labels and coordinates become parts of user tasks that yielded positive feedback for the proposed VR-based visualization of bibliographical data. Through some questionnaires, our experiments demonstrated a proof of concept according to the proposed framework resulting in good usability, especially concerning clarity, ease of access, and layout settings.