Mapping the Output of Topical Searches in the Web of Knowledge and the Case of Watson-Crick (2003)

HistCite[TM] is a system that generates chronological maps of subject (topical) collections resulting from searches of the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science (WoS) or Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index on CD-ROM. WoS export files are created in which all cited references for source documents are captured. These bibliographic collections are processed by HistCite, which generates chronological tables as well as historiographs that highlight the most-cited works in and outside the collection. Articles citing the 1953 primordial Watson-Crick paper on the structure of DNA will be used as a demonstration. Real-time dynamic genealogical historiographs will be shown. HistCite also includes a module for detecting and editing errors or variations in cited references. Export Files of five thousand or more records are processed in minutes on a PC. Ideally the system will be used to help the searcher quickly identify the most significant work on a topic and enable the searcher to trace its year-by-year historical development. ********** HistCite system resulted from a long-term-needs assessment of users of bibliographic databases. Librarians and users need to identify the key works on a particular subject, while scholars and editors desire rapid historical reviews of new topics. HistCite is designed to satisfy both of these requirements, whether for reference service or in writing review articles or historical introductions to new manuscripts. It uses a visual data-mining method based on the analysis of citation links between various documents in an academic library, making it appropriate as a topic for bibliomining. History Even before the advent of the Science Citation Index (SCI), the use of citation data was discussed in the 1964 report The Use of Citation Data in Writing the History of Science. This included a historiograph that sketched the history of DNA from Gregor Mendel in 1865 to Marshall Nirenberg in 1961, through various stages including Avery-McCleod-McCarty in 1944, through Watson-Crick in 1953. Flow charts of the papers were created manually, based solely on the references cited in a set of core source papers identified in a book by Isaac Asimov on the genetic code. This gave rise to speculation on the potential use of citation indexes for historiography. (2) Similar maps were later created by Tony Cawkell. (3) In an information retrieval course taught at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, students were required to create similar topical historiographs. It was believed that these historiographs would aid in studying the contemporary history of science. Since history and bibliography were intimately linked, the term historiobibliography was coined. (4) A frequent topic of discussion during the DNA mapping project was the idea of writing computer programs that would create such maps directly from the electronic files of SCI. There was a possibility that this would require random access to ISI's massive files so that cited and citing documents could be retrieved in real time. In the 1960s, however, low-cost gigabyte memories were still a dream. implementation of real-time mapping had to wait for the time when computer memories were large and cheap enough to handle retrospective files covering many decades of literature. Though the PC had not yet come along, online searches were possible in the 1970s; mapping in real time, however, was still not feasible. Only very recently, when PCs could handle the output of a completely linked large file of thousands of records, did the creation of historiographs In real time become feasible. There have been many different types of mapping exercises performed on a relatively small scale. In the past, co-citation clustering required mainframe computers and, in most cases, still does. (5) These ideas were later extended to creating small cluster maps online as in the SciMap system developed by Small at ISI. …