There exist diverse services that researchers can use to stay in constant contact with colleagues that are used to identify perfect collaborators at the right time and to manage productive teams. Among them are commercial services, e.g., LinkedIn or Facebook, as well as sites that were specifically designed for scholars, e.g., Academia.edu-the LinkedIn for academics-or VIVO-the Facebook for researchers.

A number of International Researcher Network (IRN) sites expose high quality institutional data via web sites and/or semantically structured RDF data. Among them, and listed in alphabetical order are: Elsevier's Collexis, Harvard's Catalyst Profiles, Stanford's CAPS system, Converis, and the NIH funded VIVO system. Thanks to these systems, scholars are uniquely identified via their institutional IDs and are linked to the papers they have published, the patents they authored, the funding they received, and the courses they teach. Never before has such a comprehensive record of scholarly activity data been available in machine readable format and advanced semantic search. Intelligent recommender services, automatic resume generation, and novel science of science studies have become possible through this data.

This web site aims to show the adoption of IRN systems across the U.S. and also internationally since January 2010. Users can turn on/off different data layers to explore the number and quality of loaded people, paper, patent, funding, and course records or animate the growth of data holdings from 2010 to today. They can hover over a data icon that is area size coded to see details while clicking on it to get a listing of the records below the map area, and also hide/show the map as needed.

It is our hope that this web site will encourage future adoption and usage of IRN systems in support of scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, and the communication of research results to diverse stakeholders.

Please see Comparison of Research Networking Tools and Research Profiling Systems for a comparison of more than 60 different research networking tools and research profiling systems.

The web site was designed by Chin Hua Kong, Micah W. Linnemeier, Joseph Biberstine (programming), Nianli Ma (data preparation), Michael J. Stamper (design), and Katy Borner (concept), Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, SLIS, Indiana University.

Used technology: Google Map API V3, jQuery, Python, and HTML5.

This project is funded in part by the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists NIH U24RR029822 award.