Friday, August 15, 2008

CiteWeb: Following citations made easy

One good way to keep up with the literature in a field is to track which new papers are citing seminal papers of the field. Each Friday, I get lots of citation alerts from ISI Web of Science, but often enough I see the same paper again and again (citing different papers that are on my watch list). So I set out to write an app that would take ISI's RSS feeds, coalesce them, and give them back to you. For example, in the screenshot one review paper is citing five of my tracked papers:
If you're using citation alerts from Web of Science, then give CiteWeb a try at citeweb.embl.de. If you find a bug, you can either comment here, or grab the source code and fix it. :-)

I started working on this to try out if Google App Engine was useful. It turned out that downloading many items from a remote host leads to time-outs from App Engine, so I ported the app to Django. The source code is released under the MIT License.

5 comments:

chris said...

Hi, When I click "show the citations" after "submit Query",
I got error messages
"AssertionError at /view/f6b254e92184ff9a1697cc392496f8f9fc311c6c",
etc, and last sentence is
"You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 500 page."

Michael Kuhn said...

Hi Chris,

from the database it looks like you've been successful to get your papers into CiteWeb. I guess there was some error parsing the HTML from ISI, although some helpful messages would probably help ... :-/

chris said...

hi Michael me again, this time I can import my papers alright, when I click
"Immediately show the citations.",
got this error message "The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.etc.." I post the source code here,
https://webfiles.uci.edu/cwang2/citeweb/
Thanks.

Michael Kuhn said...

Hi Chris,

I downloaded your file and can reproduce the error. I'll have a look what's wrong and tell you when it's working again. (Strangely, my citation alerts still work.)

best, Michael

Michael Kuhn said...

ok, now it's working... for some reason it parsed some "empty" papers. :-/