Citationchaser: Forward and Backwards Citation Data for Evidence Syntheses

citationchaser is a package for automating citation chasing in systematic reviews. It uses the Lens.org API to generate lists of references from and citations to a given set of input articles, drawing from sources like PubMed, CrossRef, and Microsoft Academic Graph. The tool was created by Neal Haddaway.

Use Cases

• Automating forward citation chasing based on a list of known relevant articles.
• Automating backward citation chasing based on the references within known relevant articles.
• Identifying potentially relevant records for inclusion in a systematic review based on citation networks.
• Supplementing traditional database searches in evidence synthesis workflows.

Strengths

• Automates a traditionally manual process for systematic reviews.
• Leverages the Lens.org API, which aggregates multiple major academic databases.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic or source bias inherent to the aggregated Lens.org databases.

Provenance

Source

Neal Haddaway

Collection Method

Automated via the Lens.org API.

Time Range

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Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

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