I recently used Graphviz to draw the connections between some authors pubblications.
Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in useful formats, such as images and SVG for web pages, PDF or Postscript for inclusion in other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser.
For example i used a simple DOT file to write all the connection between the authors and I produced a PNG file.
http://www.graphviz.org/
Here there is all the documentation that you need and in the gallery section you can see a lot of output example.
Hoping it could be helpful.