Ryan C Briggs

Maybe this exists and I am just behind the curve, but why there is no good software or online service that analyzes your bibliography and suggests other entries? I don’t think this would be hard to implement.

There are at least two ways this could be done. Simply matching keywords would be a strong start. Google Scholar already has an option to suggest articles that are similar to a given search result. I don’t know if they are using keywords to do this, but given that it is google, keywords are a pretty safe bet. What is needed to make this really useful is a way of generating suggestions based on a group of articles. This should significantly reduce the noise in the results.

The second of doing this would be to examine the bibliographies of the articles that are in your bibliography and make suggestions based on that. The information on “who cites who” is already tracked (many search services tell you who cited whatever article you are viewing), it would just be a matter of intelligently using it.

If this information is public, and some of it must be if google is indexing it, then the rest is just a matter of weighing the relevance of other articles and making suggestions. I know that this isn’t easy, but a lot of online services already do this (think of Amazon or last.fm), as do programs like Devon Think. I know I would pay good money for a simple way of doing this. The only downside is that it would render my current job as a research assistant mostly redundant.