Visual mining of science citation data for benchmarking scientific and technological competitiveness of world countries

In this paper we present a study where we visually analyzed science citation data to investigate the competitiveness of world countries in selected categories of science. The dataset that we worked on in our study includes the number of papers published and the number of citations made in the ESI (Essential Science Indicators) database in 2004. The dataset lists these values for practically every country in the world. In analyzing the data, we employ methods and software tools developed and used in the data mining and information visualization fields of the Computer Science. Some of the questions for which we look for answers in this study are the following: (a) Which countries are most competitive in the selected categories of science? (i.e. Engineering, Computer Science, Economics & Business) (b) What type of correlations exist between different categories of science? For example, do countries with many published papers in the field of Engineering science also have many papers published on Computer Science or Economics & Business? (c) Which countries produce the most influential papers? This analysis is needed since a country may have many papers published but these papers may be cited very rarely. (d) Can we gain useful and actionable insights by combining science citation data with socioeconomic and geographical data?