Cited and cited-by as metadata

I often find when doing a literature review I end up trying to get an idea of the landscape of a field, it’s cumbersome and tedious but it helps me to understand how things are developing and so on.

It would be great if there was even a rudimentary method of having a papers cited and cited-by section which (in the case of the papers cited could be pasted from the references section, and the cited-by section could be populated by papers creating a match with entries from the cited papers field of other papers)

I understand this is not a simple task and that there is no way to have it happen automatically, but if perhaps the references section was pasted in and there was even a simple parser which could pick up and match doi or other unique (or relatively unique) markers and perhaps have a process where matches would be marked as possible until manually confirmed.

I know this is probably too complex/niche but I thought I would throw the idea out there.

I’m not sure when this happened, but if you click on the reference there is now a “cited by” link beside “website”… nice feature!

So there is! A very nice feature.

I figured out the “cited by” link. It’s a good idea.
It would be very useful if we can see the number of citations in parentheses in front of the “cited by” link, or if we can sort papers by number of citations.

We currently get out “cited by” data from Google Scholar which places heavy restrictions on the frequency with which you can make requests. We do not actually retrieve the information until you click the “Cited by” link. This is why we cannot keep an updated citation count, nor sort by it.

It is worth noting as well that this information is not available for many articles and is skewed by the age of the article, both of which limit its utility as a sorting criterion.