Publications
Citation Map on the HighWire Portal: Find
the Best Articles on a New Topic Fast!
APStracts Being Replaced by Articles in PresS
Clarification
Citation Map on the HighWire Portal: Find the Best Articles on a New Topic Fast!
This is another article in the series, highlighting
some of the most useful features available on the HighWire Library of the
Sciences and Medicine. The portal site can be found at
http://highwire.stanford.edu.
The portal, built by HighWire Press and providing access to
the best of biomedical research, has a tool called “Citation Map,” which can
help you when you only have time to scan a few articles on an unfamiliar topic
and want to know 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), 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 at the same time
are highly cited themselves. 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.
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,
there is no record of many citations prior to 1994. However, you will be much
more lucky with the APS journals’ citations, since our full-text online archives
(legacy) now go back to 1966 and within a year will include all of the APS-published
articles. Remember, as an APS member, you can access all this wealth of
information free of charge!
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 30 articles (the graphic 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 graphic 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 even mark a set of citations and download them to a
citation manager. Next to the citation list, you also see the list of authors,
and you might 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 porta—which includes over a million HighWire-hosted
full-text articles and about 12 million Medline abstracts.
You might find it interesting to run a Citation Map on your
own articles!
In summary, here’s how it works:
What is it? Citation Map is a graphic representation of the
articles citing or cited by your selected article. The map is based on the
references found in the full-text articles of the HighWire-hosted journals. The
initial number of citations viewed in the map is 10, but you can change this
number if you desire.
What is it for? Develop reading lists to get up to speed on a
new topic; generate bulk citation lists for import into literature-management
programs; assist in refereeing or writing a review article.
What it does: Given a starting reference, Citation Map finds all articles
related by citations either citing the article or cited by the article. The
result set is expanded outward from the starting article to make a collection of
all the articles related by citation to the starting article. By noting the
number of times each article in the collection is cited, the related papers with
the greatest impact are graphed, along with the citing/cited-by relationships
among the articles in the collection. This shows you the most important papers
related to a starting article as well as temporal and “line-of-cite”
relationships between these articles.
APStracts Being
Replaced by Articles in PresS
In January 2004, APStracts will be replaced entirely
with a link to the APS Articles in PresS (AiPS). APStracts has been a popular
feature since 1994, when with the help of William Weems, it was started on the
University of Texas, Houston, Gopher server and then moved to the World Wide Web
when that was developed. APStracts is another example of APS’s early vision for
using technology to disseminate research.
Technology has allowed APS to move even further in the
direction of online dissemination than we could have originally dreamed, and
with the weekly online publication of newly-accepted research articles in all
the journals, AiPS, it is no longer necessary to provide the separate APStracts.
AiPS lists all online articles published weekly until they appear copy edited
and formatted in a journal issue. Full-text is available to subscribers and APS
members, but the abstracts in AiPS are free to all, just as APStracts have been.
Starting January 1, 2004, the APStracts page will redirect to
AiPS instead of APStracts. Abstracts for the December 2003 issues will be the
last to appear on the APStracts page.
The article, “Peace, Love, and PLoS” (1)
incorrectly implied that Dr. Patrick Brown’s Cell article was published
after the boycott deadline. It should be noted that the article was published at
the time the advocates of the Public Library of Science were circulating its
their boycott petition but prior to the implementation date for action, which
was September 2001. The Physiologist regrets any misunderstanding caused
by this statement.
1. Reich, Margaret. Peace, Love, and PLoS. The Physiologist; 46:4, 2003.
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