My submission for the Visualize Your Bibliography Contest is comprised of references from my dissertation chapter draft “Silicone pet tags associate tris(1,3-dichloro-2-isopropyl) phosphate with feline hyperthyroidism.” ....The visual arrangement is adapted from the Table of Content artwork, which depicts a housecat wearing a silicone pet tag in a room with a couch.  

References (n=10) about feline hyperthyroidism and/or toxic nodular goiter form the body of the cat in the visualization.... References (n=22) about PBDE and/or OPFR exposures form the couch on the right side of the visualization (darker blue indicates shading).... References (n=14) about passive sampling devices form the silicone pet tag in the visualization. 

—Carolyn Poutasse

Environmental & Molecular Toxicology

Here, I present twenty sources representing works that significantly contribute to upholding balance in ecosystems taken from my PhD research chapter two bibliography. I chose to display these sources in the form of miniature books folded from the first page of each printed work arranged in chronological order and hung on a carefully balanced mobile. The handcrafted mobile represents the delicate balance of ecosystems while the incorporation of miniature books folded from each source represents the significance of research in maintaining that balance. I chose to order the sources chronologically to demonstrate how early works have heavily influenced current research. Just as the slightest shift in string position or weight on the mobile will cause the structure to collapse, seemingly insignificant changes to plant community composition, flammable fuels, and wildfire behavior can result in severe losses to biodiversity and ecosystem function. Understanding how these elements interact with and influence each other is critical to maintaining balanced and healthy ecosystems. 

—Claire Tortorelli

Forestry, Ecosystems, & Society

Video link: https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/1_dy7uy363

For this project, I used the literature cited in my most recent manuscript submission [1]. The manuscript is titled “Using continental-scale bird banding data to estimate migratory demographic patterns for Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus)”. The manuscript represents the first chapter of my dissertation.

...
The map created contains hummingbirds of varying sizes, depending on how many lead authors (and thus cited articles) originated from a specific location. Bigger hummingbirds mean several cited articles originated from the same city. The image of a manuscript is located over Oregon State University, where the manuscript was produced. The arrows represent the migration of information across the globe, as seen through the bibliography.

—Josée Rousseau

Forestry, Ecosystems, & Society

I created a word network graph that is a mathematical representation of the relationships between words in the titles of all 138 sources used in my Master’s Thesis. To create this visualization, I first removed all conjunctions (and, but, nor, or, so, and yet), all dates, and most prepositions (such as in, for, by, of, with, as, and at) from the titles of my bibliography entries. I then used R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, to quantify how many times each pair of words occurred together in a title. I edited R code published by Silge and Robinson (2017) to create a visualization of the number of times words in the dataset occurred together in 3 or more titles. Both line thickness and cyan color saturation depict the exact number of times words co-occurred in titles. The distances between the nodes are representative of the mean total underlying connections between each individual word and all others. The position of each word’s label in the graph was defined manually to reduce overlap between lines and text as much as possible. This graph highlights the connections between words in the titles of my bibliography entries.   

—Katelyn Qualls

College of Earth, Ocean, & Atmospheric Sciences

The conception for this project sprouted as naturally as the fertile fields of Benton County that I drive through each day on my way to class. I am a second year graduate student at Oregon State University’s College of Public Health. I study Health Promotion and Health Behavior and my area of focus is Rural Health. For almost six years of daily commuting, I’ve been imagining the wide variety of ways a partnership between Public Health and the Granges could improve the reach of public health promotion and prevention programs in rural areas. This fall, my major professor and I began writing a scoping review on this subject.  

My research topic is on how current data on violence against Indigenous women are being gathered and used to provide culturally appropriate and quality services to Native peoples....

Many sources listed in my visualization are about reconceptualizing Indigenous data within a framework that takes into account history and social structures, because these, in turn, impact our understanding of people’s health and experiences. A prominent theme among many Native scholars is the idea of relationship among Native peoples. Their identity is intimately defined in relationship to their relatives and their environment. Moreover, in the Indigenous research paradigm, the research process is not always linear. Rather, everything is connected, a spiral, an infinite link that allows people to come to their own understandings in relation to their historical, present, and future connections. I chose to represent my bibliography as a spiral design to portray this idea of relationality and non-linearity in the Indigenous research paradigm. On the outer edge of the spiral, sources that discuss general concepts and decolonization theories are listed. As we move inward, the focus becomes more specific to my research topic. Each source is also separated by an infinity symbol (∞), indicating that the order of the sources is not necessarily by importance, but that at any point in the spiral, there is a connection to be made to other sources listed in this same spiral. 

—Susanna Park

Public Health

My bibliography is a representation of a manuscript in progress, “E-cigarette Use among U.S. College Students: Comparing Health Profiles.”....

Each of the digitally-drawn graphics were created to emulate different types of nicotine and tobacco products that were examined within my research. Each of the sources either examined or referenced a popular nicotine product it was labelled as. In researching the different types of nicotine and tobacco products, I only represent a portion of a multitude of options available on the market. Additionally, I believe that the colorful array of different types of tobacco products demonstrate the implications of marketing towards young adults and youth, which may perpetuate use. Even though the U.S. Surgeon General first reported in 1964 that cigarettes were associated with cancer and the CDC reports each year that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death, smoking is still being utilized by youth and adults. I hope that my visual bibliography shows that for every tobacco product on the market, there are more extensive research and public health efforts for the prevention of tobacco use. 

—Marissa Mayeda

Public Health

The “roots” of my research are founded in the engineering around continuous butter production. With limited current resources I began my research by looking into process improvement from a general standpoint.... This has developed into the core or “trunk” of my research into butters effect on laminated doughs. With a few methods from some hard to find sources I have adapted cereal science techniques to answer dairy processing questions. This has forced me to “branch” out into areas of science I had no idea existed.... On the “horizon” I am looking at even deeper into the complex interactions involved in both the butter and dough food matrices. As of yet no publications have “blossomed” so currently the tree is barren of fruit but spring is on the horizon.

Why a tree

I chose this particular tree after seeing it perched on a rock in Siletz Bay. It seemed determined to grow against all odds and adversity. With the ocean tides literally eroding the ground from underneath it stubbornly grasps at the thin wisps of sunlight that make it through the Oregon winter sky. Referred to lovingly as “Burro” by my girlfriend I can relate to this tree very much. I am holding on stubbornly to the little information I command while reaching for thin threads of enlightenment. Instead of ocean tides I am challenged and forced to contort and adapt by the challenges of graduate school. After being at OSU for almost two years I like that tree can feel time wearing me down and running out. Finally I chose this tree because it has not only withstood against the elements but has done so gracefully, perhaps a trait I may not share but one I can strive for.

—Sebastian Ramirez

Food Science & Technology

This visual bibliography celebrates the connectivity between highly specialized research that spans several disciplines in coral reef research....

—Katie McConnell

College of Earth, Ocean, & Atmospheric Sciences

Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/327843065

During my time at OSU, I have worked on designing Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) based systems in CMOS technology, for light detection and gamma-ray spectroscopy purposes. Specifically, my work has focused on designing the diodes (transducers), interface circuits, ADCs and digital backends... I have also worked on CMOS-based flow sensors. Within this, my work focused on designing on-chip transducers and power delivery blocks....

The visualization is essentially a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design. A chip that consists of multiple sensor systems is often referred to as a lab-on-chip, especially if it includes the integration of microfluidics. Even though it is not an actual lab-on-chip, the four publications that I have listed could be parts of a lab-on-chip in which cell-counting, cell-imaging and radiation spectroscopy could be done. Therefore, in the visualization, each of the four edges of the lab-on-chip (the central block), represents one of my four publications (starting with paper 1, i.e. the bottom edge, going anti-clockwise). 

—Shaan Sengupta

Electrical & Computer Engineering

The network of connections between sources that I have constructed is a unique way of visualizing the linked nature of scientific work. To construct this network, I took the sources from the Introduction of my most recent research paper, which focuses on a group of super-abundant marine bacteria called SAR11, and compiled data on the year of the paper and the field of the paper. Those sources became the “nodes” for my network. Next, I went through each of my sources and searched for any citations of the other sources from my paper. Using this method, I was able to compile a list of connections between my sources. As the Introduction provides a literature review of pertinent research to provide the literary backdrop of my manuscript, I thought it was an apt section to utilize.

The story of my research is reflected in the network, especially in the group of large circles that clump together from within the last 17 years. These are all papers about SAR11, which was discovered in 2002 by Steve Giovannoni. The close spatial relationship of my paper to the microbiological papers about SAR11 is an easy way to visualize how my work is a continuation of many of those works. Another interesting story is the way in which the biochemical papers fit into the network, as many of them are on the periphery of the network. Most of them are cited by only a few of the microbiology papers for specific enzymatic processes that that paper studied. On the other hand, the oceanographic papers tend to clump together, as many of them are looking at environmental concentrations of compounds that use similar methods as other oceanographic works.

Research in the life sciences, like most fields of academia, is not a lone-wolf venture; rather, it is built off decades and centuries of research in the field, conducted by a myriad of researchers who also built off each other’s work. My network visualizes that connectedness in a tangible way, while telling some thought-provoking stories unique to my field of research and my research project.