A picture from a thousand words [information visualization]

Anyone engaged in scientific work knows how difficult it is to keep up with the latest scientific advances. The overwhelming volume of literature-related to the growing number of peer-reviewed print outlets and Internet-based sources - combined with cutting-edge science's increasingly interdisciplinary character means that scientists, educators, students, policy makers, and funding agencies need new methods to understand the structure and development of knowledge domains. To address this information glut, the author developed a visualization methodology that combines approaches from information science, computer science, and geography. In this article, the author presents results of a visualization of the geographic knowledge domain based on several thousand conference abstracts as well as a visualization of search results from a research grants database.