Scientific field branding

Recently, there was a competition put forward by the British minister of science to explain the Higgs-Boson in 2 pages or less (link needed). Similar wagers have been made before to explain climate change in one slide, or string theory in less than 2 minutes.

Here, I propose two simple visualizations using already existing widgets for the shortest practical introduction to a scientific field (i.e. a given keyword eg. visual cortex). The goal is to capture the brand of a field for a scientifically curious lay audience. For the given keyword, look up the list of publications with that keyword from Google Scholar. Prune the list to retain only top-few publications, sorted by a metric (eg. no. of citations, or other relevant ones like h-index or Erdös Number depending on the field).

1. Collect the keywords from each of these publications and input into wordle.
2. Collect the affiliations of each author in each publication and plot it on a google world map with pins.

This can be a simple add-on to a social network for scientists such as ??. In Finland it seems to be Facebook.

Coming up: For the latest in social software, see graphjam and jamglue