Histcite

HistCite^® is a software package used for bibliometric analysis and information visualization. It was developed by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information and the inventor of important information retrieval tools such as "Current Contents" and the "Science Citation Index". [Retrieved 21 July 2008 from http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/]

A free trial version of HistCite is available from the [http://www.histcite.com| HistCite web site] .

Purpose

The main purpose of the software is to make it easier for individuals to perform bibliometric analysis and visualization tasks. Bibliometric analysis is the use of the bibliographic information (titles, authors, dates, author addresses, references, etc.) that describe published items to measure and otherwise study various aspects of a specific field of scholarly endeavor [Ackerman E. Indicators of failed information epidemics in the scientific journal literature: a publication analysis of polywater and cold nuclear fusion. Scientometrics. 2006 Feb; 66(3):451–66.] [Byrne F, Chapman S. The most cited authors and papers in tobacco control. Tob Control. 2005;14:155-60.] [Chen C. CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol [online] .2005 Dec 14;57(3):359–377.] [Chen TT, Hsieh LC. Uncovering the latent domains of a research field: knowledge visualization revealed. Proceedings of the Conference on Information Visualization; 2006 Jul 5–7; Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society; c2006. p. 252–256.] [Chen TT, Su C-H. Knowledge domain visualization: main themes and evolution. Int J Innov Learn. 2007;4(5):460-70.] [Mann GS, Mimno D, McCallum A. Bibliometric impact measures leveraging topic analysis. Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries; Chapel Hill, NC. New York, NY: AMC; c2006. p.65-74. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1141753.1141765] [Pless IB, A brief history of injury and accident prevention publications. Inj Prev. 2006;12:65-66.] [Willett P. A bibliometric analysis of the literature of chemoinformatics. Aslib Proc. 2008;60(1):4–17] [Wulf E. HistComp: bibliographic analysis and visualization of the “Biological Bulletin.” In: Anderson KL, editor. Every continent, every ocean. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the International Association of the Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC); 2006 Oct 8–12; Portland, OR. Fort Pierce, FL: IAMSLIC; c2007. p. 59-68. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1912/2141] [Young AP, Library Quarterly, 1956–2004: an exploratory bibliometric analysis. Lib Q. 2006;76(1):10-18.] .

Some typical questions asked by bibliometricians that can be answered by HistCite analysis are:

# How much literature has been published in this field? When and in what countries has it been published? What countries are the major contributors to this field? What are the languages most frequently used by the items published in this field?
# What journals cover the literature of the field? Which are the most important?
# Who are the key authors in this field? What institutions do these authors represent?
# Which articles are the most important?
# How have the various contributors to the field influenced each other?

The answers to such questions are valuable to researchers, librarians, and administrators.

Information visualization is the transformation of non-numerical data into a graphic format. Visualization helps various researchers and scholars understand large collections of information. Although there are numerous uses for information visualization, HistCite performs one specific application: it converts bibliographies into diagrams called historiographs.

A historiograph is a time-based network diagram of the papers in a bibliography and their citation relationships to each other. Historiographs are based on the citation relationships between the papers in a bibliography. In a historiograph, each paper in the bibliography is represented by a symbol selected by the user. The symbols are arranged over a timeline of the publication dates of the papers. By changing the time frame of the analysis, the resulting historiograph can form a snapshot of a specific period or an in-depth look at the total history of a subject. Once a historiograph is created for a bibliography, it is easier to see and understand the subject’s key publication events, their chronology, and their relative influence.

Applications

A wide variety of professionals who need to analyze the published literature use HistCite for analysis, for example: researchers, historians, journal editors, librarians and patent lawyers.

Operation

In order to perform its functions, HistCite must import a bibliography from another source. Once the bibliography is imported, basic point-and-click commands initiate the various analyses and visualizations.

HistCite is currently set up to import bibliographies created by searches of the Web of Science database offered by Thomson-Reuters Scientific. Bibliographies from other sources can be manually entered into HistCite.

The bibliography the user feeds to HistCite represents the literature of the subject area as it is defined by that user’s unique perspective. Thus, the analyses and visualizations produced by HistCite from that bibliography are one-of-a-kind. HistCite operates on Windows computers with Internet Explorer.

References