State of Neuroscience

Tracking major trends in neuroscience

This visual puts 50 years of neuroscience research on the map — by analyzing nearly 350’000 research publications and extracting salient keywords. Based on this, we were able to map the semantic concept space of neuroscience research: how are topic related to each other — and where is the current focus of attention?

In collaboration with The Transmitter (Kristin Ozelli, Emily Singer, Rebecca Horne, Hope Vanderberg) and World Wide Neuro (Panos Bozelos, Tim Vogels). Funded by Simons Foundation.

2025-11-01

As the data‑visualization designer on the neuroscience mapping project, I led the transformation of 350,000 journal abstracts into an exploratory, term‑level landscape that invites discovery and surfaces meaningful patterns.

State of Neuroscience 2025 landing page with key-finding sparklines: Alzheimer's disease at 6.2% of 2024 abstracts, EEG rising, COVID-19 newest

This includes, for instance, shaping the core presentation model (semantic map based on keyword co-occurrence) to balance overview and detail.

I also defined the visual language, based on input from project art director Rebecca Horne — a key visual idea being the use of topographic hills and valleys which remind of cortical structures with “activation overlays” for trending areas.

Semantic trend map placing 500 neuroscience terms by co-occurrence, with heat overlay marking recently trending areas like EEG and neuroinflammation

Collaboration with research leads was essential to turn the myriad of theoretical possibilities into interpretable visuals, without sacrificing scientific soundness and precision.

Trend analysis page ranking most used, top trending and newest neuroscience terms above a streamgraph and sortable full-term table

I also enjoyed producing the site fully myself, using d3.js, svelteplot and svelte-kit. The whole site runs as a static application, with pre-computed data files for performance and ease of hosting.