While the term visualization tends to evoke images of beautiful multi-colored graphics, creating new and effective ways of representing information is more than just making things look pretty . Refbot is a web-based tool that spiders and maps a scientific literature, using a novel relational algorithm to help find relevant articles that are difficult to find through other means. Using Refbot a researcher can quickly make sense of a literature space, not only in terms of the most cited articles, but which are the most locally relevant.

 

Example of a Refbot search. While the total number of global cites of an article can be important, local and hybrid space metrics often provide a better measure of relevancy.