AuthorMap explores author relationships through co-citation patterns. The assumption is that if two authors are often cited together by many other authors, these two authors likely have common intellectual interest in their research and writing. When many related authors' pair-wise co-citation patterns are explored, we will have a map of a subject domain where authors on the map represent ideas or subtopics as well as their relationships. AuthorMap currently attaches to ISI Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), 1988-1997, about 1.26 million records.

When an author search is conducted, AuthorMap generates a list of 25 authors co-cited most often with the given author. The user then can choose to interact with two types of maps that visualize how these author related to each other based on their co-citation counts. One map is based on Kohone's self-organizing feature map (SOM), the other is based on Path Finder Network(PFNET). Both maps are generated within seconds. Both maps allow the user to drag the names on the maps and drop them to a search box to activate an automatic search by the underlying search engine.

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