Keywords:
OpenAlex, citation networks, co-citation, systematic reviews, RICS, UDCS
Project partners:
Christian Appenzeller-Herzog, Tim Wölfe
CeDA collaborators:
Rodrigo C. G. Pena, Geoffrey Fucile
Repository:
open-alex-networks
Systematic Reviews (SRs) aim to identify and synthesize the complete body of evidence around a research question. In practice, this often requires supplementary search techniques in addition to primary term-based database queries. Citation searching is one of the most common supplementary approaches.
Current SR workflows frequently use unranked direct citation searching (UDCS), where authors collect directly cited and citing papers from a set of known relevant seed references. Ranked indirect citation searching (RICS) expands this process by also collecting co-cited and co-citing literature, then ranking and thresholding results to produce a manageable candidate set for screening.
The potential benefits of RICS over UDCS are not yet well established, and practical, reproducible workflows still need to be standardized for broader adoption.
In collaboration with colleagues from the University Library of Medicine and Psychology, this project develops OpenAlex-based tooling to support systematic review workflows, but also as a general-purpose research tool. We want to help researchers navigate citation structure, thematic fields and higher-level relationships between papers, as well as create and explore knowledge-graphs.
We are developing core infrastructure and methods to use OpenAlex data in systematic review workflows, including:
