Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research. It covers more than 27 million publications and over 16 million authors across a variety of domains with updates added each week. This large collection of data has also allowed users to create several innovative ways to visualize and explore academic papers, authors, conferences, and journals.
One of the most exciting feature of Microsoft Academic Search is the Visual Explorer. Visual Explorer allows you to visualize the relationships between researchers who have coauthored publications or cited each other. In Visual Explorer, each circle represents an author with top collaborators positioned closer together. You can view their relationships in three ways: (1) coauthor Graph mode allows you to visualize the researchers who have collaborated with a particular researcher. If you hover over the line between two authors, the number of publications they have coauthored is displayed; (2) citation Graph mode does the same thing, but with citations rather than coauthorships, while Coauthor Path mode shows how any two given researchers are connected to each other, rather than focusing on one researcher.
This is my own coauthor graph 🙂