Visualizing the Evolution of Human Knowledge

How have diseases been studied over the past 70 years? We created fascinating and mesmerizing bar chart race graphs to show the most frequently cited diseases and genes in PubMed. To do this, we downloaded information from more than 29,000,000 articles (250+GB of data) and used the MeSh terms to count how many articles were published per year for each disease. For genes, we utilized the NCBI file that associates genes with PubMed articles.

Users can select the following parameters:

Per Year - checking this box will create bars with number of articles per year. This is why the numbers may decrease from one year to another. If this box is not checked, the bars will show the total number of articles published until the year shown in the bottom right.

Speed - it controls how fast the years will change

# Bars - it controls the number of bars to be displayed

Year Start and Year End - it establishes the year the race will start and end