  We present the Influence Flower, a new visual metaphor for the influence
profile of academic entities, including people, projects, institutions,
conferences, and journals. While many tools quantify influence, we aim to
expose the flow of influence between entities. The Influence Flower is an
ego-centric graph, with a query entity placed in the centre. The petals are
styled to reflect the strength of influence to and from other entities of the
same or different type. For example, one can break down the incoming and
outgoing influences of a research lab by research topics. The Influence Flower
uses a recent snapshot of Microsoft Academic Graph, consisting of 212million
authors, their 176 million publications, and 1.2 billion citations. An
interactive web app, Influence Map, is constructed around this central metaphor
for searching and curating visualisations. We also propose a visual comparison
method that highlights change in influence patterns over time. We demonstrate
through several case studies that the Influence Flower supports data-driven
inquiries about the following: researchers' careers over time; paper(s) and
projects, including those with delayed recognition; the interdisciplinary
profile of a research institution; and the shifting topical trends in
conferences. We also use this tool on influence data beyond academic citations,
by contrasting the academic and Twitter activities of a researcher.
