Mapping Literature Landscapes with Data-Driven Discovery: A Case Study on MOEA/D

We are living in an era of "big literature", where scientific literature is expanding exponentially. While this growth presents new opportunities, it complicates mapping global scientific research landscapes, as manual review methods become infeasible. Recent advancements in machine learning, complex networks, and natural language processing have enabled numerous data-driven discovery methods. Building upon these tools, we introduce an end-to-end workflow for analyzing large-scale literature landscapes, LitLA. This workflow first integrates diverse publication metadata into a bibliographic knowledge graph (KG) representing the research landscape. It then offers tools for exploratory analysis of various landscape aspects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LitLA via a case study on follow-up works of multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). In doing so, we constructed the MOEA/D research landscape as a KG comprising over 5,400 papers, 10,000 authors, 1,600 institutions, and 78,000 keywords. With this landscape, we start with descriptive statistics and investigate prominent topics pertaining to MOEA/D and interrogate their spatial-temporal and bilateral relationships. We then map the collaboration and citation networks to reveal the community's growth over time. We further experiment whether learning on latent patterns of this landscape can hint on future research directions.