Using Circos to trace the "circle of influence" of a scientist

What:
This is an evening project at the occasion of a symposium honoring Pr. Frans van den Bosch, a professor at my university

It shows all the co-authors of the professor, with the tickness of links corresponding to the number of co-authored publications

Visualization tool:
circos

Data source:
all the publications of the professor in a bibTex file

Processing:
I used Java to parse the bibTex file and generate the Circos configuration file. I implemented the possibility to select the publications restricted to a range of years

Impressions:
Circos makes indeed impactful visualizations. It is a real pain to configure (15+ config files, anybody?), but has an incredibly helpful debugger

Source code:
Github repository (the code is quite ugly as this was for a single night project!)

Higher res picture of the circle:
Click here for a better quality picture.