Recently, I’ve had a number of students wrestling with the challenges of scoping a field, pulling together a literature review, and trying to determine how different pieces might be in conversation with each other. I used to sometimes sit students down with Ed Summer’s old ‘Etudier’ package which was great; but Google Scholar doesn’t really let you pull things out in any way that doesn’t involve scraping, and scraping websites has become very difficult these days – especially Scholar. But there are other options, like Open Alex, Semantic Search, Arxiv. In which case, I give you Wyrm, a visual citation network explorer with metadata download. Source code (it’s a 1-pager) is at github.com/shawngraham/shawngraham.github.io Enter a search term or paper title. See what search returns. Add articles to the canvas. If the services have information about what cites what, that’ll appear. Nodes that are larger have been cited more often. Anything you add to the canvas will be a big red splodge, so you don’t get lost. Export the graph as edge and node list for subsequent analysis/manipulation. DOIs are clickable.
