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

<p dir="ltr">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. </p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p>