Multiple criteria analysis of the popularity and growth of research and practice of visual analytics, and a forecast of the future trajectory

Abstract

AbstractThis study employs Google trends and data from the web of science to evaluate the popularity, growth, and impacts of visual analytics (VA) as a research field and data science technique. The paper undertakes quantitative analyses and visualization of the temporal trends, from VA's emergence in 2000 to the end of 2019. The trend analysis helps to forecast future growth in the research and practice of VA. The study highlights four outcomes. First, there is a robust direct relationship among the variables, including VA's growth on the Google trends, the scientific literature production (SLP), and usage of the published documents. Second, the SLP's growth pattern highlights VA's popularity as an emerging field with an overall annual increase of 17.4%. The high citation counts of the published scholarship indicate a significant impact and a continuous growth of the VA field. Third, VA contributes to diverse disciplines other than computer science and information systems, from business and economics to engineering, healthcare, biomedical and chemical sciences, and arts and humanities. VA helps researchers and practitioners in multidisciplinary fields analyze multidimensional data, enhance data visualization, knowledge discovery, generating insights, and make informed decisions. On the reverse, other disciplines contribute to propelling VA's popularity through research productivity, usage, and citation impacts. Finally, a trend analysis predicts sustained future growth of VA technology in research and practice to dissect and sensemaking of the increasingly massive and complex data structures, which is now the norm in many fields.