VisualBib: Narrative Views for Customized Bibliographies

Existing citation indexes of scientific literature, like Scopus, WOS, Google Scholar and OpenAire, collect metadata of papers and authors. By using appropriate queries, it is possible to access these metadata, find specific papers and all associated details, as well as retrieve indices, metrics and information about authors. However, a big issue is that they generally do not aggregate the results of subsequent searches and do not offer explicit representations of author/citation relationships between found items. This paper introduces VisualBib, a Web application prototype conceived to support researchers who wish to create, modify, visualize and share bibliographies. Starting with a small set of papers or with a restricted number of authors, it generates, in real-time, an interactive visual representation of the corresponding bibliography; the user can explore the network of cited/citing references and dynamically add new papers in order to build up customized bibliographies which are represented using holistic, aggregated and graphical views.