

Ask HN: What about representing academic papers on graphs? - milkers

I have an idea which is representing each academic paper on a graph based on their references lists. Each vertex will be the paper representation(paper itself) and the edges will be the references pointed from/to the related paper. It seems to be a decent UI representation for papers. Is that a novel idea or implemented/thought before? How would it be useful for discover related papers when reading a specific one? I am asking for the HN people's invaluable comments about this thought.
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CyberFonic
I've been extracting stuff out off .bib files and using GraphViz to graph
citation and collaboration graphs for some time. It is very handy for personal
research. But even in that limited context I've been finding that the graphs
can get very messy, very quickly. And GraphViz can get bogged down trying to
come up with a neat layout.

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dalke
I believe you are describing a citation graph.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_graph>

If so, then perhaps the Microsoft Academic Search page would be useful to you,
or perhaps PubMed and the various tools which help visualize PubMed data.

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milkers
Thank you for the term 'Citation Graph'. Now I know at least some people have
been working on this topic.

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pwg
How does this differ from how <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu> works? It also
allows one to walk the citation graph from paper to paper.

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milkers
I am asking for an interface similar to this [http://www.bunch-
it.com/web?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=hacker+...](http://www.bunch-
it.com/web?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=hacker+news#A)

This has been done by 2 of my friends as their graduation project. But it does
not work in the fashion I wanted.

I looked <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/> and liked it but I could not walk the
citation graph as I meant. I looked at the about page and they also do not
mention about 'Citation Graph' as a feature. But it seemed to me someone could
use that site to create a 'Citation Graph' easily.

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pwg
They don't call it a "citation graph" but for each publication you pull up, if
they have the data, all the citations are hyperlinks to the pages for those
cited publications. So from each document, you can walk backwards to those
that it cites.

In the past they also had a "cited-by" link-set on each document, which
provided the ability to walk forward to documents which cite the one shown.
But looking at their cite now (it has been a while since I looked at them) the
forward citation links appear to be missing, which looses half the citation
graph.

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wwwtyro
They do something very much like that here: webofknowledge.com

...but it's usually unusably slow. I'm curious: where would you get the data?

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glimcat
I don't believe that the citation list is copyrightable ("copyright does not
protect facts" [1]). Ergo, anyone with access to a papers database could
contribute, or you could port it over from other citation graphs.

Many papers databases will give you a formatted list of citations, which would
be easier than trying to extract it from a set of arbitrarily formatted PDFs.

[1] <http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html>

