Electronic Resources Reviews
Web of Science's "Citation Mapping" Tool
Brian D. Simboli
Science Librarian
Library and Technology Services
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
brs4@lehigh.edu
Copyright 2008, Brian D. Simboli. Used with permission.
In July 2008 Thomson Reuters added a new "citation mapping" tool to its Web of Science product. This tool, which is touted on the Web of Science (hereafter, WOS) search interface as a beta version, enables users to visualize the relationship between citing and cited references. The citation mapping tool is a welcome addition to WOS. Below I discuss how the tool works, offer some comments and suggestions about it, and conclude with some notes about future directions.
Persons interested in bibliographic visualization software may also find of interest HistCite, developed by Eugene Garfield, pioneer of cited/citing searching and analysis. For an overview of HistCite, see Herther (2007). This review will not compare the new citation mapping tool in WOS to the features of HistCite, but will reference the HistCite web page in a few places.
WebCite®, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.
A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.