Who are the movers and shakers in your field? You can use social network theory on your bibliographies to find out:
Today I learned about some studies looking at social networks constructed from bibliographic data (from Mark Newman, see Newman 2001 or Said et al. 2008) . Nodes on a graph represent authors and edges are added if those authors have co-authored a paper.
I scripted a little tool to construct such a graph from bibtex files – the bibliographic data files used with latex. The Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography – a list of the most relevant papers in the field – is available in bibtex format.
You can look at the program using the online Academic Networking application that I scripted today, or upload your own bibtex file to find out who the movers and shakers are in your field. Soon, I hope to add an automatic graph-visualisation, too.