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ASBMB Today, October 2002 [In the January issue, ASBMB Today introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press, which allows you to search all of Medline plus 330 journals' full-text at once -- including the JBC, of course! We began a monthly series of short articles highlighting tools or features of this new site for researchers' sore eyes. The new site is at http://highwire.stanford.edu ] The new portal from Stanford's HighWire Press has a tool called "Citation Map" to help you answer the question: "I only have time to scan a few articles on an unfamiliar topic; which are the best?" Perhaps you are meeting a new colleague for the first time; perhaps you have encountered a new topic in refereeing an article; or a new topic in your general reading, in a conference, or in a lecture; and you want to know what is going on in this area that is new to you. Or perhaps you have to give a lecture or write a review article and want help selecting a bibliography.
Previously, the available tools were a keyword search - but this might return too many articles that are distantly related to a topic - or an author search - which might return too few articles, narrowly focused on a single person's work - or a "related articles" search - which gives you related articles, but no sense of how important they are in the field.
The new Citation Map tool provides a way to identify articles that are directly-related by citation to a given article and are highly-cited themselves, at the same time. It graphically displays the articles so you can see which articles cite which other articles. It sorts the related articles by frequency of citation on the topic, and thus helps you prioritize your reading when you are unfamiliar with a field. It also shows you which authors and which journals appear most often. This information might, for example, lead you to evaluate other articles by a key author in the field.
You will find a hyperlink titled "Citation Map" on many items in a search result in the new portal. Click on the link to have the system compute a citation map starting from the particular article you've chosen
Take a look at the example Citation Map shown for 1999 JBC article by Jaburek et al. (Figure 1). The top of the example repeats the full citation to the article. Then a map shows the most recent articles on the left (a PNAS article from 2001) and the oldest article on the right (JBC 1994); Jaburek et al. is in the middle. All articles shown are well-cited (Citation Map doesn't show all citations; that would be overwhelming); the yellow circles show articles that are the most highly-cited within the group of related articles. Note that the map shows not only the articles cited by Jaburek, but the articles that cite Jaburek. So you can look forward and backward in time, to see what "happened with" an article's work after it was published. In fact, this particular example shows seven generations of citations! Obviously, the more recent an article, the fewer articles will have cited it; because of the technology, articles whose full-text HTML is not online won't have citations from them (and, because of the limits of online citation history, we don't record many citations prior to 1994). But within last 5-7 years, there is a wealth of material.
By default, the map shows only the ten most highly-cited articles related to the one you've chosen. But you can ask it to map up to thirty articles (the graphical map is hard to read above 20 articles). The list of citations is easy to read no matter how many articles you ask for.
If you find it hard to read the graphical map's citations, just click on any circle, and a popup window will give you the full citation for that article. In addition, the citations themselves include a Citation Map hyperlink, so you can shift the focus of your map by remapping with the "central article" at a different focus. You can mark a set of citations and download them to a citation manager. Next to the citation list (Figure 2), you also see the list of authors, and you might find sometimes find it useful to explore the work of an author who is unfamiliar to you; clicking on an author's name will bring up a list of all of his or her articles in the portal - which includes a million HighWire-hosted full-text articles, and about twelve million Medline abstracts.
You might find it interesting to run a Citation Map on your own articles!
In detail, here's how it works:
What is it for?
What it does: ...with more to come!
The above articles are online at
Next month we'll look at new techniques to further refine your search when your search retrieves far too many results to examine. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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