An R package and Shiny app for forward and backward citations chasing in academic searching
Details
In searching for research articles, we often want to obtain lists of references from across studies, and also obtain lists of articles that cite a particular study. In systematic reviews, this supplementary search technique is known as ‘citation chasing’: forward citation chasing looks for all records citing one or more articles of known relevance; backward ciation chasing looks for all records referenced in one or more articles.
Traditionally, this process would be done manually, and the resulting records would need to be checked one-by-one against included studies in a review to identify potentially relevant records that should be included in a review.
This package contains functions to automate this process by making use of the Lens.org API. An input article list can be used to return a list of all referenced records, and/or all citing records in the Lens.org database (consisting of PubMed, PubMed Central, CrossRef, Microsoft Academic Graph and CORE; https://www.lens.org). USERS MUST OBTAIN A TOKEN FOR THE LENS.ORG SCHOLARLY API (available for free here).
A shiny app version of the package is available here: https://estech.shinyapps.io/citationchaser/.
NR Haddaway, MJ Grainger, CT Gray (2021) citationchaser: An R package and Shiny app for forward and backward citations chasing in academic searching. Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.4533747