Citation Mapping – Tool for scientific researchers

Just when you think you have the next great idea somebody’s already beaten you to it. The Citation Mapping Tool from Thompson’s Web of Science is another one of those kick ass tools. Its apparently been out since July 2008. Shame on me for not doing better research into existing tools.

CITATION MAPS IN WEB OF SCIENCE

The citation mapping tool tracks an article’s cited and citing references through two generations, allowing researchers to visually discover an article’s wider relationships:

* Go forward and backward in time to track citing and cited references

* Color code, re-configure and organize your citation maps to discover trends in citation activity

* Completely interactive!

* Access via any Web of Science full record

via Citation Mapping.

They also have a nice little tutorial.

I also found this review from Brian D. Simboli, Science Librarian, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The review appears to be extensive. I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly read it but he does provide a good overview of

1. how it works,
2. how it can be used (teaching, visualization, documenting impact of submitted articles, etc) and,
3. possible improvements (too many to list here but its worth jumping to the Comments and Suggestion and Future Directions section to read)

It will be interesting to know how this tool is really used and if it is successful.

Journal citation network mapping – An example

More fancy charts and diagrams

This map visualization puts journals, which frequently cite each other, closer together. You can drag the white magnification lens around to enlarge a part of the map for closer inspection. Clicking one of the nodes will highlight all its connections. If a journal is selected, the node sizes represent the relative amount of citation flow (incoming and outgoing) with respect to the selection; otherwise, they are scaled by their Eigenfactor™ Score.

via well-formed.eigenfactor.org : Map.