A new variant of the Pathfinder algorithm to generate large visual science maps in cubic time

In the last few years, there is an increasing interest to generate visual representations of very large scientific domains. A methodology based on the combined use of ISI–JCR category cocitation and social networks analysis through the use of the Pathfinder algorithm has demonstrated its ability to achieve high quality, schematic visualizations for these kinds of domains. Now, the next step would be to generate these scientograms in an on-line fashion. To do so, there is a need to significantly decrease the run time of the latter pruning technique when working with category cocitation matrices of a large dimension like the ones handled in these large domains (Pathfinder has a time complexity order of O(n⁴), with n being the number of categories in the cocitation matrix, i.e., the number of nodes in the network).