Welcome to citationchaser!


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); read more here.

Large searches may take several minutes to complete, so please be patient.

Consider asking your library to support Lens.org to continue to enable Open Discovery of research articles.


Follow these steps to start chasing!

In the "Article input" tab, paste a list of article identifiers (e.g. DOIs)

Check the articles returned are the ones your interested in

If you want to perform backward citation chasing (which articles did my articles reference?) then proceed to the "References" tab and click "Search for all referenced articles in Lens.org"

If you want to perform forward citation chasing (which articles have cited my articles?) then proceed to the "Citations" tab and click "Search for all citing articles in Lens.org"

You can download in RIS format a list of your input articles, referenced articles, and citing articles for easy integration with your reference/review management workflow

Once you have finished citation chasing, why not check out the citation network visualisation in the "Network" tab? Please be aware that large citation networks (many or highly cited starting articles) may take considerable time to load.

Developers

Note that you can now refer users to citationchaser with a preloaded set of article identifiers, which will be initially run, ready for citationchasing. Simply concatenate the following URL stem with a comma-separated list of identifiers:
https://estech.shinyapps.io/citationchaser/?dois=[doi1],[doi2],[doi3]&pmids=9pmid1],[pmid2],[pmid3].
Any identifier type can be used together for multiple concurrent searches.

This works for DOIs ('dois='), PubMed IDs ('pmids='), PMC IDs ('pmcids='), CORE IDs ('coreids='), and Microsoft Academic IDs ('magids='), as per the following worked example:
https://estech.shinyapps.io/citationchasertest/?dois=10.1038/s41559-020-01295-x,10.1371/journal.pone.0138237&pmids=32652585,32706299


The Lens is a service provided by the not-for-profit organisation Cambia. This application and its developers have no financial relationship with The Lens or with Cambia.

If you'd like to cite this work, please use:
Haddaway, N. R., Grainger, M. J., Gray, C. T. (2021) citationchaser: An R package and Shiny app for forward and backward citations chasing in academic searching. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4543513
Download package citation (.ris)

See the GitHub repository

Enter the articles that you want to start from. We will first check the full citations in the Lens.org database.

You must complete this step before retrieving references and citations.

EITHER:
1: Paste your identifiers in (each id separated from the next using a comma, carriage return (new line), or space)



OR:
2: Upload your data as a CSV or RIS file



Your input articles





References from your articles (backward citation chasing)


Once you have loaded your input articles, you can search for all referenced articles across them.






Citations of your articles (forward citation chasing)


Once you have loaded your input articles, you can search for all articles that cite them.






Analysis of your citation chasing results


We're updating the analysis features - we'll be back soon!

Visualise the citation network


We're updating the network visualisation features - we'll be back soon!