Improving the functionality of interactive bibliometric science maps

The use of a map as a metaphor of a scientific field is an established idea and using it as an interface to bibliometric data seems to have great potential. Nevertheless, our own implementation of such an interface came up with some limits inhibiting the user to comprehend as to what he was looking at. As a result, the map was not used to its fullest potential. The implementation described in this paper as a high-level (conceptual) design, addresses the problems noted by users. It combines both top-down and bottom-up access to the bibliometric data, something we see as vital to mapping internal knowledge onto the external depiction and vice versa. And as such, it becomes a more complete tool to explore the mapped scientific field and to find and retrieve relevant information.