An Open Source Web Application for Automated Citation Searching via Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex

Citation searching involves looking through the reference section of an article (Backward citation) and also all papers that have cited the starting article (Forward citation) as a means to obtain potentially relevant articles for a given research question or evidence synthesis task. This is also known as snowballing. This app aims to facilitate that to a non-technical audience.

Under the hood we are querying the Semantic Scholar Application Programming Interface, which holds a database of over 200 million papers, from a range of sources, including PubMed, Preprint servers, and Microsoft Academic Graph. We recently added support for OpenAlex as well which has comparable coverage.

This is part of a doctoral project investigating how to incorporate AI and automation into evidence synthesis, and work is underway in empirically investigating best practice in utilising automated citation searching during evidence retrieval.