Finding the papers that cite each of two different papers

Dear community,

With Google Scholar, one can list all the papers that cite a given paper. However, if one wants to find all the papers that each simultaneously cite a given *set* of papers (even just two or three), doing it this way becomes cumbersome, and involves manually overlapping the Google Scholar lists for each cited paper in the set.

I wonder if there is a creative way of doing this automatically, with Zotero...
«1
  • Not realistically, no. Zotero doesn't store any citation graph data
  • ok, thanks.
  • edited May 17, 2019
    BBT contains a rudimentary exporter that GML citation graphs.
  • @emilianoheyns I suppose you are referring to the graph citation export option? Can that be imported directly to graphviz?
  • Yes. It’s graphviz compatible.
  • edited May 17, 2019
    The translator is called "Citation graph", and the output is a .gml file (I had forgotten I had switched to GML at some point). yEd can export it to .dot. Direct to .dot is possible but the rendered graph was generally unreadable for non-trivial graphs. yEd did much better.
  • Sweet, thanks :)
  • It relies on there being lines of the form cites: citationkey in the extra field.
  • I still have hope that the Zotero relations at some point become directional and labeled, which would make stuff like this possible in a more integrated way. Could also be useful for book/chapter relations for example.
  • @emilianoheyns let's hope the zotero folks are monitoring these threads and hopefully will take things under consideration in improving the final product.
  • adamsmith is one of the zotero folks :)
  • I realised that there is a simple&decent workaround to do this in Zotero:
    - create a new (group) library
    - for every paper of interest, pull up the Google Scholar page that lists the papers citing it
    - create a separate collection and import these citing papers there (20 at a time, since GS will not display more; the first batch of 20 is, however, enough in most cases)
    - repeat for all papers of interest
    - this new library's Duplicate Items collection will list all papers that cite each of the papers of interest. Q.E.D.

    However, the problem with this method is that GS seems to ban or somehow invalidate the Zotero translator as soon as you've imported the first chunk of 20 papers. Afterwards, any attempts of importing GS results pages results in the infamous message "An error occurred while saving this item", cf https://imgur.com/a/lhG6HsO . In my experience, this kind of ban takes several days/weeks to lift.

    SUbsequent visits to GS result in a captcha challenge, but even when this is solved, importing pages of GS results in Zotero does not work. Only selecting and importing one paper at a time from such a page works.

    Any idea how to get around this?
  • See here for some tips on working with GS’s site access limits https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/site_access_limits
  • edited May 20, 2019
    Thanks! Yeah the My Library intermediary step seems to be the only workaround. Saving each item into My Library still needs to be done manually be clicking on the star, but it helps if one restricts the search results for all citing papers by inputing extra keywords for them. For the case of N=2 papers whose citing lists one wishes to overlap one need not, in fact, even use Zotero at all, since starring the results of the first list and browsing through the second list will already highlight what the papers are that cite both.
  • I think Microsoft Academic Search might also have some features that might be helpful in this regard.
  • That's a very interesting new (to me at least) academic search engine, thank you for pointing out. It does offer citation lists for a given target paper, but I could not find a way to cross these for multiple target papers.
  • edited May 22, 2019
    Very interesting topic! I agree with @emilianoeheyns and @kirk86 that it would be really cool if directional reference graph data would be supported in Zotero. I'm trying to start a discussion about how it could be done: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77492/fetching-paper-references-on-import
  • Thank you for taking the idea further, great to see this!
  • @lupuli thanks indeed for pushing it along.
    I'm not an expert at all when it comes to zotero internals but here's my two cents of ideas

    There're two ways that occurred to me on how this might happen.

    1) Automatic
    from the items in the different collections the graph of connections is created by looking at the metadata on how each paper cites the others. This could probably be retrieved third party services like semantic scholar for instance.

    2) Manual
    There's the zutilo plugin which allows us to easily relate items by putting a link in the related tab of each item we relate with each other. This could be leveraged to create a connected graph to show some kind of connection between these items.

    These ideas could be further enhanced with the usage of mind maps for instance.
  • To anyone who is interested in local citation networks: I've just released the beta of my open source web app visualizing reference-data from Microsoft Academic and Crossref. It might interest you! https://timwoelfle.github.io/Local-Citation-Network/
  • I'm using Citation Gecko in addition the above Local Citation Network. They're nice but it would be best to have something well-integrated with Zotero
  • Hi all! This is a very interesting discussion.

    > It relies on there being lines of the form cites: citationkey in the extra field.
    @emilianoheyns, do you know how these data is supposed to be added to the extra field? Is there an automatic way? Or does one have to do it manually? Thanks!
  • I added them manually. If there's an automated way to get citation relations I'd be very interested to hear about it.
  • I am presenting a proposal to develop a Zotero plugin that would add citations support using data from WikiData. The idea also includes an easy way to manually or automatically add missing citation information, and to contribute these data back to WikiData. It would also offer citation graphs for the user's local collections, to help them better understand their literature and discover relevant pieces they may be missing.

    The plugin would adapt and blend ideas from different open source projects, such as @lupuli's great Local Citation Network, @emilianoheyns' BBT, @zuphilip's zotero-open-citations, among others.

    You can read the full proposal here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite/grant/WikiCite_addon_for_Zotero_with_citation_graph_support

    Support from both Zotero and Wikimedia communities is very important. If you like the proposal and would like to endorse it, please follow the instructions below:

    1. Create a Wikimedia account, if you don't have one already.
    2. Go to the Endorsements section of the proposal and click Edit.
    3. To endorse the proposal, enter a new line like this:
    * {{s}} Why you think this is a good idea. --~~~

    The {{s}} at the beginning indicates "support" (use {{o}} to indicate opposition instead).
    Explain why you think the proposal is a good idea, and any extra projects that may benefit from it.
    If you are not an active member of WikiData or another Wikimedia project, you may indicate your field and position.
    The "--~~~" at the end is needed and will introduce your signature and date.

    You can also post questions and comments in the proposal's discussion page.

    I can make changes to the proposal based on your comments until October 1st. The committee will consider the proposals on October 7th, so please submit your endorsements/comments before that date.

    Thank you!
  • Hi all! The proposal to develop a plugin to add citations support to Zotero using WikiData (see above) will be evaluated tomorrow by the WikiCite committee. It would be great if you could post your comments, questions and concerns to the discussion page to make sure different points of view are taken into account tomorrow, and later on during development if the proposal is approved. Thank you!
    https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikicite/grant/WikiCite_addon_for_Zotero_with_citation_graph_support
  • My proposal to develop a WikiCite plugin for Zotero, adding citations metadata support, back and forth syncing to Wikidata, and local citation network visualization, was approved and I started working on it some time ago.
    I wanted to let you know that today I publised the first very early pre-release. I can't emphasize enough how early a pre-release this is. It is far from being production ready, and there are still many things to implement, and even more to polish.
    You can read the details in the pre-release announcement [1], and see some screenshots in the proposal's discussion page [2].
    The plugin is built as a bootstrapped extension (instead of a XUL overlay extension) following Dan Stillman's advice [3], and using Will Shanks' Zutilo plugin as an example. I am also trying to avoid using XUL as much as possible, and using standard React/HTML as suggested [4].

    [1] https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-wikicite/releases/tag/v0.0.1
    [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikicite/grant/WikiCite_addon_for_Zotero_with_citation_graph_support#v0.0.1_very_early_pre-release_published
    [3] https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/345799/#Comment_345799
    [4] https://groups.google.com/g/zotero-dev/c/xYC0I8JaUAI/m/56ohWjniCgAJ
  • Hi, all! I have just published pre-release v0.0.2 of the WikiCite plugin for Zotero, including one-way communication with Wikidata. See the release notes [1] for a brief explanation of the changes included, or the project's talk page for a demo video with the main highlights. Although it is still a pre-release, please feel free to give it a try and report any bugs or feature requests here [3]. Just make sure you backup your library or use a separate profile [4], just in case.

    [1] https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-wikicite/releases/tag/v0.0.2
    [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikicite/grant/WikiCite_addon_for_Zotero_with_citation_graph_support#v0.0.2_pre-release_published
    [3] https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-wikicite/issues
    [4] https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-wikicite#installation
  • Hello there,
    I tried this plugin. However, at the 16th second of the video, the pdfs coming to the citiation section are not uploaded.

    So, the pdf I chose had 3 citations. and I could not see these 3 references. Not uploaded to Zotero.
  • edited March 8, 2021
    I wonder if I can get an answer from you. @diegodlh . I actually liked this plugin. It can work very well. However, the process in the 16th second in the video you describe its use does not work. I know this is a beta study. I just want to help this work. It will be a plugin I hope to use in the future.
  • @zmetedinler, I just came here to post a new message and noticed that I never posted the reply to your message I'd written weeks ago! It looks like I left it as draft :(. Here it goes. Hope it's still useful...

    Hi @zmetedinler! Thanks for your feedback on the Wikicite plugin for Zotero I'm developing. You're right it is still a preliminary release, and documentation is still missing. But I'm happy to know it is being tested already.
    Just to make sure, you mean you are working with a Zotero item that has a PDF attachment, and that this attachment has three references. Does the item have a Wikidata QID? For the moment, reference extraction from PDF attachments is not supported. Only synchronization with Wikidata (for items which already have an entry in Wikidata).
    If you wish, we may have a longer discussion in the repository's discussion section: https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-wikicite/discussions
Sign In or Register to comment.