Cyber-environments have become increasingly popular in disseminating scientific and educational resources. One of the primary methodologies for evaluating the scholarly impact of cyber-environment is through bibliometric and scientometrics analyses of publication and citation data. However, it is often difficult to create a workflow and software environment that can address this problem in serious ways. This article presents the software architecture for creating a web-based interface for managing citations and demonstrating visually the scholarly impact of a cyber-environment - nanoHUB.org, which has served over 310,000 users worldwide in just the last 12 months.

We present a design study of the Deep Insights Anywhere, Anytime (DIA2) platform, a web-based visual analytics system that allows program managers and academic staff at the U.S. National Science Foundation to search, view, and analyze their research funding portfolio. The goal of this system is to facilitate users' understanding of both past and currently active research awards in order to make more informed decisions of their future funding. This user group is characterized by high domain expertise yet not necessarily high literacy in visualization and visual analytics-they are essentially casual experts-and thus require careful visual and information design, including adhering to user experience standards, providing a self-instructive interface, and progressively refining visualizations to minimize complexity. We discuss the challenges of designing a system for casual experts and highlight how we addressed this issue by modeling the organizational structure and workflows of the NSF within our system. We discuss each stage of the design process, starting with formative interviews, prototypes, and finally live deployments and evaluation with stakeholders.

The science gateway nanoHUB.org is the world's largest nanotechnology user facility, serving 167, 196 users in 2010 with over 2,300 resources including 189 simulation programs. Surveys of nanoHUB users and automated usage analysis find widespread simulation use in formal classroom education, thereby connecting recent research more rapidly and closely to education. Analysis of 719 citations in the scientific literature by over 1,300 authors to nanoHUB.org resources documents use of simulation programs by new research collaborations, by researchers outside of the community originating the program, and by experimentalists. The publication and author networks reveal research collaborations and capacity building through knowledge transfer. Analysis of secondary citations documents the quality of the conducted research with an h-index of 30 after just 10 years of operation. Our analysis proves with quantitative metrics that impactful research can be conducted by an ever growing research community. We argue that HUBzeroTM technology and the user-focused design and operation of nanoHUB.org are keys to success that can be transferred to other science gateways.

In this paper we present findings from a project that used topic modeling and associated techniques to chart the emergence and growth of research topics in engineering education research over 9 years, from 2000-2008. As a field engineering education research has undergone significant changes over the past decade. There has been an increase in the number of scholars and practitioners involved in the field, particularly those that are applying rigorous research principles to advance understanding of engineering education. In such a circumstance, it is important to understand the topics, approaches, and ideas that have caught the imagination of people in the community. Since this nature of work has not been done in relation to engineering education research, a significant part of the effort described here is innovative and exploratory in nature where different techniques were tested with the goal to collect a diversity of topics that are of interest to the community. We identify major categories of topics and primary topics of interest to the community. We also identify a lack of engagement with theoretical and analytical ideas as an area of concern.

The anthrax attacks of 2001 brought professional and public attention to the significance of successful crisis communication in the context of bioterrorism. The project discussed in this paper is an initiative taken to respond to the calls for more effective bio-terror crises communication training. The goal of this project is to address various challenges in bio-terror crises communication by developing an innovative crisis communication training module for public relations students. This goal is achieved by attending to two main factors: (a) keen awareness of important theories in crises communication response, and (b) "hands-on" training in real-time bio-terror communication handling techniques. This paper introduces the process taken to develop 3D simulated crisis communication training material and presents future plans to assess its effectiveness.