A team of MoBS researchers has participated to the data challenge sponsored by the “Mining the Digital Traces of Science” workshop. The organizers provided a subset of the full ISI Web of Science database corresponding to the field of Embryology and asked participants to find informative ways of visualizing it. 
The MoBS team has produced a visualization of the field of Embryology over the course of the last 20 years. We geocoded the affiliations of 169,577 papers published in this period and analyzed the citation patterns at the city level. Two cities were connected whenever a paper written in city A cited a paper written in city B. The color of the edge color varies from green to red indicating the direction of citation, from citing to cited city. Green areas indicate regions where new papers are being produced, while red areas indicate the regions that lay the foundations for the current developments. The top 10 most influential cities according to a newly developed ranking algorithm are also shown as well as a word cloud illustrating the main topics studied during that year. As the animation progresses, we are able to see geographical and topical patterns emerging. New leading cities emerge and the Embriology explores new topics as seen by the word cloud and the geographical distribution of links.