About the Compassion Researcher Map

The network plots co-authorship of researchers who have authored more than one compassion-related paper, coloured by their principal theme of interest. Circle-size denotes the researcher's publication output, while the thickness of the connecting lines relate to the number of collaborations between researchers. Each collaboration is coloured according to the publication's principal theme. Sizes are not proportional for visualisation purposes.

The network was created by querying the PubMed API to fetch relevant publications using the following search terms in article titles and abstracts:

Compassion Focused
Compassionate Mind
Mindful Self-Compassion
Compassion Cultivation
(self-criticism OR shame) AND compassion

Early searches using ‘self-compassion’ and ‘compassion’ as terms yielded too many results.

The text was then processed and assigned to one or more topics (defined using key terms), and then plotted as a network.

How to explore the map

Exploring this map is similar to using a map app such as Google Maps.
Clicking each circle will show the user a clickable link to the researcher's PubMed indexed publications that mention the term ‘compassion’.
Individual researchers and groups of researchers can be highlighted using the dropdown options in the top left, or you can also select via research interest.
To go back to the map, click anywhere in the white space.

Limitations

This is the first version of the compassion map and we anticipate further refinements in the future. We welcome feedback, please feel free to contact us. George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” We hope this one is useful.
People with the same last name and first initials are aggregated together - this is how the PubMed API returns the data.
Papers not indexed on PubMed do not show here.
In some cases the estimated proportion of themes in each document (or person) are equal - as we can only use one colour in this visualisation, the first theme is selected. You can get an idea of the variety of people’s research interests by looking at the colours of their links to other researchers.
Compassion research is often transdiagnostic - this is harder to create search terms for, so unfortunately this could not be its own topic.
We could only include researchers with two publications or more. The current network contains approximately 300 researchers. There are over 1,000 researchers when including researchers with just one publication, making the map very difficult to navigate. A similar issue occurred when we tried to include research papers that were more generally about compassion.
The map is not ‘live’. The data for the map were last collected on 27th June, 2023. We plan to update the map approximately every six months.

The research map was created by Thomas Ingraham and Gráinne Schäfer.