14 October 2024

Viewing the progress of scientific knowledge as a tree

There was a scientific paper I found regarding a certain topic, but it was published in 2004. I wanted to see if there was any new research that built on that knowledge, but I didn't know if there was any tool which could help me search for it more visually. I decided to ask on Academia StackExchange, but decided to do a cursory search before asking. I found this question which led to multiple tools that did at least a fair job of visualizing papers via citations. Some of these are:

Citation Tree

https://www.citationtree.org/

Cit Net Explorer

You can download and use this tool.

https://www.citnetexplorer.nl/

Connected Papers

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

Inciteful

https://inciteful.xyz/

Lit Maps


VOS Viewer

https://www.vosviewer.com/

Zot Net

This appears to use strings to find relationships.

https://www.conundrumescapes.com/zotnet/zotnet.php

Scope for improvement

Most of these tools appear to rely on utilizing citations to build their tree. This is insufficient to correlate the actual knowledge that scientific research builds upon, since authors may not have cited all papers relevant to the actual knowledge they are building upon. Even the visualization graphs available offer a very poor visual representation and interactivity that is needed when navigating such information. Perhaps one way to improve on this, would be to use a large language model to analyze the contents of each paper and build links between papers based on the knowledge they build upon. This would help not only view but also better track the progress of knowledge in any scientific pursuit.

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