INTRODUCING BIBNET

Your new best friend for literature reviews

Malcolm Garbutt October 2016

WHAT IS BIBNET?
Literature reviews are hard work.
Systematic literature reviews are REALLY hard work.
You know that you have missed authors, overlooked
concepts, and may have even skipped key papers.
On the other hand you did include that author who
you are absolutely POSITIVE is important.
Or are they?

So, how do YOU

check this?

WHAT IS BIBNET
The most likely scenario is that you to go to
Google Scholar and start checking citations.

NOT!
You probably submitted the work anyway.
Ok, back to the hypothetical scenario.
You go to Google Scholar and start checking
citations ...

WHAT IS BIBNET
and Panic .

... or even worse you get sidetracked ...

WHAT IS BIBNET
Enter, stage left, jimmytidey and Bibnet:
Im at the stage of my PhD where ... I need a
literature chapter that sets the theoretical
context explaining what has already been
written about my topic and clarifying my key
terms.
Jimmy asks: Are there already any papers that
cite authors from all of these areas? Can I
confirm my suspicion literature almost never
cites relevant

WHAT DOES IT DO?

Bibnet is a prototype network approach to finding papers

using data from Google Scholar It is a web app that starts
with a set of search terms you are already citing

[awwww, so I have to do some work first]

With the list of search terms, Bibnet performs two steps:

It

records papers or books for each of the search terms (up to 10

results per term)
Using search within citations it checks to see if any of the authors
recorded have cited any of the publications

This process generates files that can be exported to the

Gephi visualisation tool.
In

Gephi, the size of the nodes indicates number of inbound links,

the thickness of the edge indicates the number of connections
(citations and coauthoring) between two nodes

[is that a Rhizome I see?]

SO SHOW ME

Run Meteor in the console (Windows: cmd)

[I

created batch processes]

Open a browser to http://localhost:3000

Copy

Search Terms into Bibnet

Press Find Papers

Watch console till completed

Press

Add Citations

Watch Console till completed

SO SHOW ME

Press Generate .dot file

Copy the output to a .dot file
Import the .dot file into Gephi
Analyse and Revise
Adding search terms expands the existing output

To quit Meteor [which is easier than quitting smoking]

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-C

LIMITATIONS
Jimmy:
I should acknowledge firstly that the citation
network is not the only way to discover papers,
and also that Google Scholar is an incomplete
source of data itself

REFERENCE
https://mystudentvoices.com/scraping-googlescholar-to-write-your-phd-literature-chapter2ea35f8f4fa1#.wha443gtk