D3 is a JavaScript Library that allows the creation of interactive data visualisations. D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents and its advantage is that it is using internet standards as HTML, CSS, and SVG as the foundation. This gives maximal compatibility across all moderns browsers. It is widely used by journalists, data scientists, and starts to be used by academic scientists, too.

Here I want to present a simple way of creating interactive illustrations of collaboration networks, e.g., for your own website. Before going into details, have a look at the example below, it presents some of Rosalind Franklin’s papers and her co-authors.

The network illustration is a so-called bipartite network because it consists of two types of nodes, blue nodes represent scientists and orange nodes represent publications. These nodes are connected if a scientist is an author on a publication. This way of presenting is a so-called force layout, which simulates repelling Coulomb forces between all nodes and spring-like attractive forces act on nodes that are connected via links. You can drag the nodes around and explore the behaviour of the network.

You will have noticed that you can also see the name of the publications and co-authors when you hover over the nodes. For some of them, a representative figure or photograph is shown, too. You can also double-click the nodes and will be directed to the webpage of the publication or author.

For larger collaboration networks the visualisation is still possible but might get a bit messy. Thus, not showing any figures is advised. Furthermore, the name of the nodes should be shown either below the illustration or as a tooltip (the later is not possible in WordPress but on normal web pages as here). The illustration below shows all 124 publications written by OPIG, together with the 310 authors. Here, I had to remove the Head of the Group Charlotte Deane, as she is on almost all of these papers and would clutter the illustration, unfortunately. In network science, we call such a node an ego node.

If you want to play around with this, check out my Github repository. The creation of the network is fairly simple. You only need a Bibtex file and can then execute a Python script that creates a JSON file that is read into the JavaSript. This can then be incorporated in all web pages easily.

PS: To enable D3 in WordPress you need a special plugin.  Apparently, it is not up to date with the current stable D3 version 4 but you can load any missing functions manually.