Co-cited author maps as interfaces to digital libraries: designing Pathfinder Networks in the humanities

Using data from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index for 1988-1997, we are attempting to generate co-cited author maps in real time that can serve as interfaces for document retrieval. Our novel approach is to start the maps by entering the name of a single author. Our system obtains a rank-ordered list of the other authors who are most often co-cited with the input name (e.g., the top 50) and then systematically pairs these other authors in turn to obtain their co-citation counts. The resulting matrix can be passed to a mapping program which groups the authors meaningfully to show the structure of the field implied by the input author's name. At present we are experimenting with Pathfinder Networks (PFNETs) as the mapping program, and show a PFNET for 25 authors in hermeneutics, a major field of the humanities. The documents co-citing the mapped authors are candidates for retrieval. We discuss desirable features and design considerations in retrieval interfaces based on PFNETs.