A Web application for creating and sharing visual bibliographies

The amount of information provided by peer-reviewed scientific literature citation indexes such as Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), CrossRef and OpenCitations is huge: it offers to the users a lot of metadata about publications, such as the list of papers written by a specific author, the editorial and content details of a paper, the list of references and citations. But, for a researcher could be interesting also to: extract in real-time these data in order to create bibliographies, for example, starting with a small set of significant papers or a restricted number of authors, and progressively enriching them by exploring cited/citing references; dispose of a graphical and aggregate representation for them; be able to easily share them with other interested researchers. With these main intents, we modelled and realized VisualBib, a Web application prototype, which enables the user to select sets of papers and/or authors in order to create customized bibliographies, and in real-time visualize them, aggregating data from different sources, in a comprehensive, holistic graphical view. The bibliographies are displayed using time-based visualizations, called narrative views, which contain explicit representations of the authorship and citing relations. These views may help users to: describe a research area; disseminate the research on a specific topic through the sharing of personal points of view; show in a fresh look the entire production of a researcher, or research groups, in order present or evaluate it.