Visualizing big science projects

The number, size and complexity of ‘big science’ projects are growing — as are the size, complexity and value of the data sets and software services they produce. In this context, big data gives a new way to analyse, understand, manage and communicate the inner workings of collaborations that often involve thousands of experts, thousands of scholarly publications, hundreds of new instruments and petabytes of data. We compare the evolving geospatial and topical impact of big science projects in physics, astronomy and biomedical sciences. A total of 13,893 publications and 1,139 grants by 21,945 authors cited more than 333,722 times are analysed and visualized to help characterize the distinct phases of big science projects, document increasing internationalization and densification of collaboration networks, and reveal the increase in interdisciplinary impact over time. All data sets and visual analytics workflows are freely available on GitHub in support of future big science studies. This Perspective describes how visualizations help to understand several key aspects of big science projects: productivity and impact over different phases, evolution of teams and their management, big data and cyberinfrastructure, and measuring and communicating success.