The visualization of dynamic graphs is a growing research area. Starting with first approaches in the 90s, the field has been steadily growing to around 20 new publications per year recently. While early publications mainly introduced new visualization techniques, currently a well-balanced mix of technique, application, and evaluation papers is published.
First, animation-based approaches showing graph evolution as animated changes in node-link diagrams dominated. Since 2002, however, alternative timeline-based approaches were suggested that provide an overview of the graph evolution in one view without animation. By 2010 and later, these techniques are even dominating the newly proposed approaches, some combining animation and timeline in hybrid techniques. Also, researchers recently explored using adjacency matrices instead of node-link diagrams to represent the individual graphs.