Personometrics: Mapping and Visualizing Communication Patterns in R&D Projects

People such as R&D engineers rely on communication with their colleagues to acquire information, get trusted opinion, and as impetus for creative discourse. This study investigates the prospects of using bibliometric citation techniques for mapping and visualizing data about the oral communication patterns of a group of R&D engineers. Representatives of the R&D engineers find the resulting maps – we term them personometric maps – rich in information about who knows what and potentially useful as tools for finding people with specific competences. Maps of old projects are seen as particularly useful because old projects are important entry points in searches for information and the maps retain information indicative of people’s competences, information that is otherwise not readily available. Face-to-face communications and communications via phone, email, and other systems are more ephemeral than scholarly citations, and (semi-)automated means of data collection are critical to practical application of personometric analyses.