Citation Mindmap

[Curtisc]

I know of several document/reference managers (Referencer, Zotero, RefWorks, etc), but one thing that I would like to find is a program that identifies the links between papers. When I'm doing a lit review, I like to read articles and then follow the citations, and what I end up with is a bunch of papers that cite each other all over the place. I think it would be pretty cool to have a mindmap style picture showing all the connections. Does anyone know of a program like this, or ideas on how it could be implemented? Does it even sound like a useful tool, or just gimmicky?

[jeremytaylor]

For Nasa Ads, the big database of astronomy/astrophysics papers there is http://paperscope.sourceforge.net/index.htm I don't know whether something similar exists for your field or whether you could adapt paperscope. I played with it briefly but the novelty wore off pretty quickly.

Jeremy

[Curtisc]

Paperscope is similar to what I was thinking of, but it looks pretty crowded. What I would like is a way to see all the connections between the papers that I have in my database, rather than all of the papers that ever cite the one I'm reading. That way, instead of displaying one paper with hundreds of links (doesn't seem all that useful) I could display more like 40 papers showing all of the links between them, so I could see at a glance that paper X cites both Y and Z, but Z also cites Y.