Several years ago, I created a map of scientific collaborations. The attention this map obtained surpassed my wildest expectations; it got published in the scientific and popular press all around the world! I had mainly forgotten about it until I received an email that rekindled my interest in this visualization and I thought it was high time to revisit this visualization.

Unfortunately, scientific papers (and associated data) are closely guarded and only a handful of firms have full access to them. I now work in a very different field, so I lost access to this dataset. But while perusing my Twitter feed, I came across the very active feed of Scimago Lab. Their social media presence and their incredible interactive visualizations convinced me that they might be interested in collaborating. I sent off an email to their founder, Félix de Moya and, lo and behold, he was interested in collaborating. Cool!

Read on for more maps and an overview of the methodology >>



After a bit of back and forth, I spent a weekend programming a tool to draw large geographical graphs. The tool I used a couple of years ago was riddled by projection bugs and was terribly inefficient (and the source was lost when I reformatted an old hard disk), so a rewrite was in order. The idea behind the tool is really simple. It loads up a graph in memory and then goes through the graph edge by edge to draw every edge following the curvature of the earth and projecting each line using the Plate Carré (overlappable on Google Maps) or Eckert III (which I find beautiful).

Click here to open this map in a new window