  How to achieve academic career success has been a long-standing research
question in social science research. With the growing availability of
large-scale well-documented academic profiles and career trajectories,
scholarly interest in career success has been reinvigorated, which has emerged
to be an active research domain called the Science of Science (i.e., SciSci).
In this study, we adopt an innovative dynamic perspective to examine how
individual and social factors will influence career success over time. We
propose ACSeeker, an interactive visual analytics approach to explore the
potential factors of success and how the influence of multiple factors changes
at different stages of academic careers. We first applied a Multi-factor Impact
Analysis framework to estimate the effect of different factors on academic
career success over time. We then developed a visual analytics system to
understand the dynamic effects interactively. A novel timeline is designed to
reveal and compare the factor impacts based on the whole population. A
customized career line showing the individual career development is provided to
allow a detailed inspection. To validate the effectiveness and usability of
ACSeeker, we report two case studies and interviews with a social scientist and
general researchers.
