CiteSpace analyzes relationships among authors, publications, and citations. Using a "social networking analysis" sort of approach, visual mapping is provided to enable researchers to find relevant pubs, and to enable pharmaceutical and biotech firms to
"The use of citation networks as a ranking methods is not free from problems, but it's, IMO, a vastly superior approach to scientific value discovery and would yield a much better service to the scientific community in general than the current peer review
Y. Sun, R. Barber, M. Gupta, C. Aggarwal, and J. Han. Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, page 121--128. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2011)
C. Wang, J. Han, Y. Jia, J. Tang, D. Zhang, Y. Yu, and J. Guo. Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, page 203--212. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2010)
L. Dietz, S. Bickel, and T. Scheffer. Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Machine learning, page 233--240. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)
S. Maslov, and S. Redner. (2009)cite arxiv:0901.2640 Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, invited comment for the Journal of Neuroscience. The arxiv version is microscopically different from the published version.