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 and patterns 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, etc., 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 academic publications. Some practical guidance on what is worthwhile in presenting publication information online will be given.

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

2. Introduction
• Prof. Jonathan Bowen
• Mathematics, art, engineering,
computer science, software
engineering, museum informatics
• Career: Oxford, Reading, LSBU (Emeritus)
• Visitor: King’s College London, Brunel,
Westminster, Waikato (New Zealand, 2011),
Pratt Institute (New York, USA, 2012)
• From September 2013: Professor of
Computer Science at Birmingham City Univ.

3. Overview
• Communities
• Visualization
• Publications
• Co-authorship
• Citations
• Databases
– Google Scholar
– Microsoft Academic Search
– Academia.edu
Penrose
tiles

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

9. Google
• Museum label

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

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

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

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

14. Patterns of publications
• Humanities: books, some journals
• Established sciences: journals, short
papers, fast publication (months)
• Computer science: conferences, then
journals, long papers,
slow publication (years!)

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

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

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

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

19. Patterns of co-authorship
• Humanities: single authors
• Computer science: small numbers
• Chemistry: larger
numbers (e.g., 10)
• Physics: Even larger
(can be 100s)

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

21. Patterns of citations
• Humanities: footnotes
• Computer science: references
• Self-citations – increase
other citations
• Gender differences

22. Interdisciplinary citations
• Citations between fields

23. Fake citations!
• “Ike Antake” experiment
• 100 “papers”, all cross-cited
• H-index > Einstein!

24. • 100 cross-citations
Ike Antake citation experiment

25. Using Scholarometer – up to 97 citations
Ike Antake measured citations

26. Citations model
• Journals, works, authors

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

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

29. Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954)
• Centenary year in 2012
– www.turingcentenary.eu
• Andrew Hodges (Turing biographer)
– Alan Turing: the Enigma (1983)
– www.turing.org.uk
• The Turing Digital Archive (3,000 images)
– King’s College Cambridge
– www.turingarchive.org
• Jack Copeland’s Turing Archive (facsimiles)
– www.alanturing.net

30. Turing’s Worlds (23–24 June 2012)
• Department of Continuing Education, University
of Oxford – http://conted.ox.ac.uk/turing
Ivor Grattan-
Guinness et al.

31. Happy Birthday Alan Turing!
• Also Ivor Grattan-Guinness, historian of mathematics
and logic (born 23 June 1941)

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

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

34. 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:
www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/alan-
turing-the-founder-of-computer-science

35. 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

36. AlanTuring
warholize.me

37. 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.

38. ErdosNumber
Relationship of an author with Paul Erdos.

39. Academic
Search
co-author
path
Robin Wilson,
mathematician
and EVA
London 2012
co-author

40. The Bacon number
• Kevin Bacon (born 1958),
film and theatre actor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon_number
• Cf. Erdős number, but for film credits
• “Erdős–Bacon number”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős–Bacon_number
Sum of person’s Erdős/Bacon numbers
(as low as three!)
• Further numbers for other fields?

41. 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

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

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

44. Academia.edu search engine accesses
E.g., lsbu.academia.edu/JonathanBowen

45. Academia.edu document accesses
Last 30 days

46. Academia.edu document accesses
Last 30 days

47. Academia.edu top documents
Last 30 days

48. Academia.edu keyword searches
Last 30 days

49. Academia.edu country accesses
Last 30 days

50. Academia.edu
top country
accesses
Last 30 days

51. 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 ...

52. 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

53. ACM Digital Library
• Computer science professional body
• Editable personal publications page
• portal.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81407593776

54. ACM Digital Library
Personal page features

55. DBLP – Computer Science Bibliography
• University project – personal publications page
• Major computer science journals and conferences
• dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/b/Bowen:Jonathan_P=.html

56. DBLP – Computer Science Bibliography
• University project – personal publications page
• Major computer science journals and conferences
• dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/b/Bowen:Jonathan_P=.html

57. ResearchGate www.researchgate.net

58. Mendeley – www.mendeley.com
Professional networking, managing/sharing papers

59. Mendeley – www.mendeley.com
Professional networking, managing/sharing papers

60. Mendeley – www.mendeley.com
Professional networking, managing/sharing papers

61. Summary
“If we knew what it was we
were doing, it would not be
called research, would it?”
– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
• Plethora of sites
• Check you profile on a selection
• Choose one or two effective ones

62. Patterns
“There are only patterns, patterns on top
of patterns, patterns that affect other
patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns.
Patterns within patterns. ... What we call
chaos is just patterns we haven't
recognized. What we call random is just
patterns we can't decipher.”
– Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962)

63. Conclusion
Prof. Jonathan Bowen
jonathan.bowen@bcu.ac.uk
www.jpbowen.com
• Academia.edu – virtual community
• Academic Search – visualisation
• Google Scholar – visibility