Visualizing Article Similarities via Sparsified Article Network and Map Projection for Systematic Reviews

Systematic Reviews (SRs) of biomedical literature summarize evidence from high-quality studies to inform clinical decisions, but are time and labor intensive due to the large number of article collections. Article similarities established from textual features have been shown to assist in the identification of relevant articles, thus facilitating the article screening process efficiently. In this study, we visualized article similarities to extend its utilization in practical settings for SR researchers, aiming to promote human comprehension of article distributions and hidden patterns. To prompt an effective visualization in an interpretable, intuitive, and scalable way, we implemented a graph-based network visualization with three network sparsification approaches and a distance-based map projection via dimensionality reduction. We evaluated and compared three network sparsification approaches and the visualization types (article network vs. article map). We demonstrated the effectiveness in revealing article distribution and exhibiting clustering patterns of relevant articles with practical meanings for SRs.